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News / Northwest

Wildlife agency seeks permission to kill sea lions to save protected fish

By Karin Brulliard, The Washington Post
Published: June 15, 2018, 9:25pm

For years, hundreds of California sea lions have colonized the docks in the Oregon port town of Astoria, their loafing brown bodies serving as both a tourist attraction and a nuisance begrudgingly tolerated by officials. Authorities have deployed deterrents — including beach balls, electrified mats and a mechanical orca — in futile attempts to scare off the pinnipeds without harming them, because they are protected under federal law.

But when it comes to sea lions that swim their way from the coast to inland rivers, Oregon officials are no longer feeling so indulgent. After years of nonlethal hazing efforts, the state wildlife agency is now seeking permission to kill them.

The sea lions are a target because of their voracious appetite for threatened and endangered fish. They gobble up so many winter steelhead at Willamette Falls, south of Portland, that state biologists say there’s a 90 percent chance the fish run will go extinct. If granted a special permit from the federal government, Oregon could trap and kill as many as 92 sea lions at the falls each year.

The conflict pits one protected species against another in an unusual battle that kill-plan proponents say is lopsided in favor of a thriving predator and that opponents say makes the species a scapegoat. Although hunting, bounties, habitat loss and pollutants caused the California sea lions’ population to drop below 90,000 in the 1970s, it has steadily risen since the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act and now numbers are nearly 300,000, or what the act calls “optimum sustainable population.” With the increase of the hulking animals has come tension over resources from beaches to fish.

“The real issue from our standpoint is just trying to find a balance,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., a veterinarian who co-sponsored legislation that would make it easier for Oregon, Washington, Idaho and tribes each year to kill more than 900 sea lions that dine on protected fish in rivers. The prospect of losing the steelhead run, Schrader added, is “just unacceptable to this veterinarian. I love animals, but fish are animals, too.”

Although they are marine mammals, California sea lions have proved to be able freshwater inhabitants. After spending the summer breeding in Southern California, the 700-pound males typically voyage up the coast in the late summer or autumn and stay until May. While there, a few dozen adventurous individuals speed up the cool waterways of the Columbia River along the border of Oregon and Washington, hang a right at the Willamette and then park below Willamette Falls, a U-shaped cascade where Chinook salmon and steelhead stall while waiting their turn at the fish ladder they use to reach upriver spawning grounds.

For sea lions, the spot is a sashimi bar. According to a 2017 state report, more than 15,000 winter steelhead were making it over the falls 15 years ago. This winter, about 1,000 did — more than the record low of 512 in 2017, but still the second-lowest number ever counted, said Shaun Clements, a senior policy adviser for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. At least 25 percent of the run this year was eaten by sea lions, the agency says.

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