Sea lions come to Point Bennett each year to breed and birth pups. They’re joined on the island by northern fur seals, the darker mammals in clumps. (Nadia Drake/WIRED)
California sea lions, like all marine mammals, are protected under the MMPA. Endangered Status (click here)
By Nadia Drake
08.16.13
9:30 AM
SAN MIGUEL ISLAND, Calif. – It’s late June, and San Miguel Island’s white sand beaches are filled with barking sea lions. More than 100,000 of them. The marine mammals have come to this windy, remote island to breed and give birth – a rowdy, stinky summer extravaganza that last year, enigmatically, ended in disaster.
When the sea lions converged on this most westerly of southern California’s Channel Islands in May 2012, as they do every spring, there was no hint of anything amiss. A year later, thousands of pups – perhaps as many as 70 percent of the newborns – were dead. The struggle to survive led desperate pups from their sandy nursery into the churning, dangerous sea, long before they were ready.
Between January and June, five rescue centers along the southern California coast, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, took in more than 1,500 stranded pups – five times more than normal....
July 1, 2013
By Katie Lee
Recently, (click here) the New York Times Green Blog described how two major Southern California fisheries (kelp and barred sand bass) had collapsed “right under the noses of management agencies.” The management and oversight of these fish stocks had not changed since 1959. This news is perhaps not surprising as there are more examples of marine species collapses off our coastline than possible to list in this blog post.
Though the media tends to focus on the effects of pollution, climate change, or overfishing, outdated systems of management are actually the main cause of the collapse in many cases....
...Though these two fisheries are now managed with the future of the fish populations in mind, and the government and fishermen appear to have learned from the past, there are still countless fisheries off of Southern California that have collapsed, even within the past few years. Many people blame this surprising decline on something called “hyperstability.” It’s a phenomenon where a high catch rate masks a decline in actual population of fish because the fish tend to spawn and congregate in large masses, giving an “illusion of plenty” (UC San Diego 2011). Though the fisheries are now required to tightly monitor the stock of fishes, because the fish congregate in large masses in certain places, their data is always too high a number.
The persistent over-fishing and consistently high catch rates are what lead to the collapse, in addition to the gradual warming of the water since 1980. If we want to preserve the ocean’s beauty and continue to eat sushi, fisheries need to not rely purely on catch rates to determine fish population level, both in Southern California and the rest of the world....
