A small, weak sea lion lay next to its side in the sand spit 12 miles north of Santa Cruz. The only signs of life were to scratch its belly and relax for a few seconds before squeezing it again.
“It’s a classic sign of lepto,” said Giancarlo Ruri, a volunteer and spokesman for the Marine Mammal Center, pointing to the miserable self-development of young animals. Leptospirosis, a cork muscle-shaped bacteria, causes severe abdominal pain in sea lions by damaging the kidneys and inflating the digestive tract. “They hold their stomachs like that, like sick children with stomach pains,” he said.
Since the end of June, authorities say nearly 400 animals have been reported to be stuck or sick along beaches on the central coast. More than two-thirds of them have died, Rulli said. Before someone found them or died in the ocean, perhaps hundreds of them would have been washed away.
Historically large and long have increased the already devastating death toll of seals, sea lions, dolphins, otters and whales living and migrating in the state’s coastal waters.
There are central coasts and southern coasts. It has large availability. And there are growing casualties, record numbers and formations in the Eastern Pacific. This year may be remembered on record as one of the most gravity for marine mammals. Or, more worryingly, there are indications that our marine environment is changing so dramatically that in some places and seasons, it is becoming less inhabitable in the life it holds.
Rulli said the network of volunteers whose marine life tends to get stuck answers dozens of rescue calls a day. “It was a brutal year. …It was tough for animals. It was traumatic for volunteers. It was a lot of it.”
Scientists don’t know if all of these pressures and changes are related or if they are completely separate phenomena occurring simultaneously in the same place.
“We are trying to build an understanding of how marine conditions are related to disease outbreaks, but that’s an ongoing task. And the world is changing rapidly under our feet,” said Jamie Lloyd Smith, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at UCLA.
UCLA disease ecologist Katie Prager said the first outbreak of leptospirosis in sea lions was reported along the west coast in 1970. By the 1980s, Marine Mammal Centers and others held comprehensive records. They found that bacteria tend to start at the end of summer and cause small annual outbreaks that lasted just a month or two.
But every 3-5 years, they will see a large outbreak where the animal scores become sick. Around 300 animals were rescued during the last two major outbreaks in 2011 and 2018, Rulli said.
Lloyd Smith and others say so Leptospira– The boom is probably driven by a typical demographic. For example, when a sufficiently large cohort of unexposed young animals gets it and passes by a beach where very social animals gather.
However, this year, the outbreak began more than a month earlier than usual, with the number of diseased animals exceeding previously recorded outbreaks.
This year seems deadly again, Rulli said. Leptospirosis usually kills about two-thirds of animals that get sick. At this point, that’s just an impression, but this year it’s even more for him.
Seeing the sick puppy in Davenport Beach, Ruri shook her head and said the animal was sick as she had ever seen.
The Little Sea Lion was taken to the Marine Mammal Center Castroville Clinic and was placed humanely shortly after being pointed out on a white board only with a “unknown corpse.”
It is not clear why this year’s outbreak is so devastating.
Lloyd Smith and Prager said Leptospira species that affect sea lions can also be found in some terrestrial mammals, such as raccoons, skunks and coyotes. It is unknown whether these scavengers are introducing new strains of bacteria into sea lions on the beach, or vice versa. Natural bacteria reservoirs are also not the area of research that Lloyd Smith actively pursues.
In the floating dock beneath the Capitola Wharf, two groups of sea lions lie in the unusually sticky, humid air that was recently late afternoon. The seven were spooning each other in two small clusters. Their flippers stretch out onto each other’s bodies, their heads resting on the tummy and back of their neighbors.
One was far from the others. That was something someone called about.
For the rescue team, it was the third stop of the day, and it would be another tough one. A quick scan of eight sea lions showed another sea lion was also feeling unwell, with her hip bones and vertebrae protruding in the ears under her dull skin.
The rescuer attempts to catch a solo sea lion by grabbing her a large fishing net, but she manages to gush it out. Veteran rescuers Jeremy Alcantara and Patrick MacDonald reorganized with others in the w head. They decided to try to sunbathe bone lion with her friends.
Since April, the state’s supervisory network of volunteer rescue teams has responded to calls daily about sick sea lions, dolphins, whales, sea turtles and birds.
The Southern California coast has had a historic outbreak of domo acid that has made more than 2,100 animals sick.
There was a record number of dead gray whales in the Bay Area.
And from San Diego to Crescent City, they saw a number of whales entangled from the charts – humpback and grey whales were caught up in the ropes and lines of the area’s commercial fishing industry.
Now, as the ocean heat waves grow in the Pacific, they feared that the Trump administration threatened to provide financial support, research and marine data to difficult animal crews, just as they threatened to inject funds from the National Maritime and Atmospheric Administration.
“Fortunately, these volunteers won’t give up,” Ruri said. “They are totally dedicated.”
It took Alcantara and MacDonald to go down the stairs from their w head to the floating dock and quietly approach the sunbathing sea lions. The thin ones they left behind were shoving her tranny firmly into her belly.
A seagull with a gull with curiosity seen from the water. Tourists and locals called out to us from above.
They caught her, caught her, carried her, carried the lamp to her w head, quickly maneuvered her into a wooden frame, then piloted the back of the air-conditioned van that drove her to Castroville, which pumped her with antibiotics and liquids.
She is currently at the headquarters hospital of the Sosarito centre, Ruri said. But “we are not accepting the offer of sustainable ground herring.”
Woodrow is 21stable, as she was nominated, and the centre veterinary staff will evaluate her again later this week.
