Sea lion pups have been stranding along the California coast in record numbers this season, and four volunteers from the staff at the Georgia Aquarium have helped keep the emaciated animals from dying.
During four weeks in February and March, Georgia emissaries served at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito and Monterey, Calif. There they gathered stranded pups in from the beaches and rocky shores, helped them recover their strength, and brought them back to the coast to send them back into the ocean.
“It is such a rewarding experience,” said Georgia Aquarium senior trainer Bryan Martin, 36, who spent the first two weeks of March helping at the California center. “For us, it solidifies our career. Everything we learn here (at the Georgia Aquarium) can translate there.”
The days volunteering at the Marine Mammal Center are 12 to 14 hours long, said Erin Morlang, also a senior trainer at the Georgia Aquarium. Volunteers show up in time to prepare meals for an 8 a.m. feeding. They feed the frailest pups fish “smoothies” through a tube, said Morlang, a process that can last until it’s time for lunch, at which point they start all over.
Also assisting in rescues, rehabs and releases was Georgia Aquarium senior trainer Kristi Thompson. Christopher Rogers, a life support technician at the Georgia Aquarium, traveled to the center to help get sea lion habitats up and running, assembling life support systems shipped there from Atlanta.
Most of the stranded pups are of nursing age — 8 months to a year — and are in danger of starving to death once they’re separated from their mothers.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, warmer water on the West Coast has driven some fish populations into deeper water farther from shore, making it more difficult for female sea lions to feed. Those nursing mothers have been leaving their pups alone for greater periods of time, and the pups, growing restless and hungry, have been striking out on their own.
“Many do not make it,” reports NOAA, “and instead wash up on shore dead or emaciated.”
More than 2,000 have washed up since January, according to NOAA spokesman Jim Milbury. Most of the stranded animals are sea lion pups, but some are also elephant seal pups and harbor seal pups. The Marine Mammal Center has rescued 690 sea lion pups so far this year, compared to 59 by the same date in 2014, according to spokeswoman Laura Sherr.
Sherr said that while some of the pups don’t survive, the center expects to return about 60 percent of the rescues back to the ocean.
“A lot of these sea lions who come in look like a bag of bones,” Martin said. “They have trouble standing up, trouble even lifting their heads. You have to be gentle with them.”
As they are brought into the facility, the pups are given an identifying tag in a piercing through one of their flippers, and are marked with a grease pencil, indicating which ones need immediate medical attention.
Martin helped bring in one pup that washed up onto the rocks beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, attracting a crowd of onlookers. The pup was listless and uninterested in the people around him. “That one had milk teeth — he had not weaned yet,” Martin said.
Nicknamed “Captain Waddell” by the park ranger who found him, the pup flourished. “I was able to check in on him a few days later,” Martin said, “and he was perking up.”
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