SHAKY TIMES FOR SEA LIONS MARINE LAW THAT PROTECTS MAMMAL MAY BE ALTERED.

Byline: TOM RAGAN

MediaNews Staff Writer

WATSONVILLE - Carefully lowering the net, Doug Ross captures what appears to be a sick California sea lion near Pajaro Dunes.

With the help of fellow volunteers Anje Vandernaald and Katharine Parker, he drags the male to a nearby cage, where it's placed inside and transported to the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, a hospital for ailing sealife.

"It was lying in the middle of the beach with all these people around, and it wasn't moving," Ross said after a brief struggle with the sea lion. "He'd been like that for two hours. Something was wrong with him. We just don't know what."

Not a day goes by that the center doesn't get a call about a sea lion that's either sick, tangled in fishing line, injured by a great white shark or shot by a disgruntled fisherman.

But there's a growing school of thought that the weaker sea lions -- those who succumb to domoic acid, inexplicably fall ill or have inadequate hunting skills -- should be left to fend for themselves.

"We need to let natural survival carry itself out," said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service who's seen the sea lion population steadily rise, as much as 6 percent per year.

"And if we don't allow it to happen, the population is going to get so big that there's going to be a massive die-off."

At last count there were roughly 300,000 California sea lions swimming up and down the Pacific Coast, from the Baja Peninsula to Canada. That's a far cry from the 2,000 to 3,000 sea lions that existed in 1972, dismal numbers that helped usher in the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Since then, the court of public opinion on the burgeoning population varies, from outright disgust among fishermen who have to compete with them, to utter joy from rescuers who see new science and hope in saving them.

"They're the canary in the coal mine," said Sue Andrews, a field manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Moss Landing, which fields calls on sick marine mammals. "Their health can tell us a lot about the state of the ocean and our surroundings. What impacts us impacts them."

But fishermen have issues with the healthier sea lions, those that steal their catch by either grabbing it off the lines in the ocean or swimming 140 miles inland to the Columbia River in Oregon, where they wait for the spring chinook to return.

"It's a feast," notes Robert Stansell, whose job as a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is to count the spring chinook consumed by the sea lions at the Bonneville Dam in Oregon.

As it is, there's a movement afoot to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act so that some of the sea lions can be killed, or "legally taken," Stansell said.

A decision is expected by spring, he said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the enforcer of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, will weigh the recommendations made in the coming months by an 18-member task force whose membership comprises the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

Although he's not a member of the task force, Stansell said as many as 100 sea lions appear each year at the dam over the course of several months -- beginning as early as January and lasting until early summer.

He says he doesn't have an opinion on the matter, but adds that scaring them off with explosives, otherwise known as "hazing," might be a worthy alternative to killing them outright.

Andrews, of the Marie Mammal Center in Moss Landing, is willing to accept hazing the sea lions, but not killing them.

"We are obviously opposed to killing sea lions," she said. "Human interaction is as much a hazard to them as anything else.

"I'm not God. I don't get to judge how many are too many or too little, that's God's job. But saving them, the way we see it, is their beneficial payback for suffering from human interaction for so long."

tragan(at)santacruzsentinel.com

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Volunteers save a California sea lion and prep it for its trip to the veterinarian at the Marine Mammal Center's main office in Sausalito, where it will be examined.

Tom Ragan/Santa Cruz Sentinel