http://www.columbian.com/news/2017/apr/06/sea-lions-moving-into-smaller-streams/


Sea lions moving into smaller streams

By By BILL MONROE/The Oregonian

Published: April 6, 2017, 6:03 AM

Every time Robin Brown heads down a dock to check a sea lion trap, he picks up a large stick.

“Once they find a place to haul out, they get pretty mulish,” said Brown, 66, one of just two marine mammal biologists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Brown will retire in June into a half-time contract with the department — still jousting with critters seemingly more and more out of control.

In the past month or two, a few California (one Steller) sea lions have moved into the lower stretches of the Sandy River and as many as half-dozen (some say more) are devouring winter steelhead in the Clackamas River, as far up as Eagle Creek.

Washington officials report sea lions prowling the lower Cowlitz, Lewis and Washougal rivers.

And these aren’t just any winter steelhead tickling their palates.

By this time of year, the earlier-arriving hatchery-origin steelhead run is largely finished, Todd Alsbury, department district fish biologist, told a group of sportfishing leaders in Clackamas.

“They’re working on wild fish,” Alsbury said. “It could make Ballard Locks pale in comparison.”

Remember Ballard Locks in Seattle?

Apparently few, if any, real lessons were learned from the decimation of Lake Washington’s meager (2,000-3,000 fish) wild steelhead runs by Herschel and a handful of sea lions in the 1990s.

In the few years it took to collect enough data to satisfy the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act’s (MMPA) proof requirements, the unsustainable run crashed.

Oregon and Washington fish managers met by telephone last week with the National Marine Fisheries Service to see if they could get any assistance, budget or otherwise, in dealing with the spreading sea lion threat.

But to no avail.

Federal scientists and agencies are feeling budget pinches of their own, especially in the propwash of President Trump’s apparent budget assault on natural resources.

Worse, it seems federal protection may be eating its own.

Both the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) — which protects the bulk of wild winter steelhead — and MMPA require data, but the ESA is then designed to rebuild populations while the MMPA is a blanket protection; one only rarely pre-empted by extensive proof of damage.

For example, look at how long it took to prove sea lions needed to be permanently removed at Ballard Locks and, more recently, Bonneville Dam

Data collection, in its infancy on the Willamette, isn’t even in the works for either the Clackamas or Sandy rivers. And removal authorization on the Columbia extends no farther downriver than Bonneville, even given the thousands of sea lions in the system.

Under the MMPA, Brown said, the Secretary of Commerce may have authority to waive data collection and authorize sea lion removal, but that’s never happened.

Such a potentially hot political potato, he said, “would probably have to come from the White House.”

PGE biologists, meanwhile are scrambling for answers if sea lions venture just a little farther up the Clackamas to River Mill Dam, where wild steelhead stack up below a brand new fish ladder built to help them recover in the upper drainage.

But PGE is unlikely to obtain a federal hazing permit before the end of the season and state managers, busy at Bonneville, don’t have enough money to help.

And anyway, hazing has never been more than briefly helpful, Brown said, although it’s also never been attempted on a smaller river.

The only effective deterrent, Brown said, is to thwart sea lions early on. They learn from each other, he said, and pay no attention to dead comrades.

But if they’re either removed or forced out of an area within the arrival of the first few, others won’t learn the same behavior.

That leaves only anglers with the right to haze without a permit.

But they must use non-lethal methods, including fireworks (constrained by local laws), slingshots and paintball guns, among other methods.

…Including Brown’s big stick.

At some point in time the gloves need to come off. Maybe writing a letter to Trump?

I'll shoot 'm

A multi-level problem. Right now, there are too many sea lions for their preferred foods. So, they go looking elsewhere. They don't have a choice; they eat fish.

We have a choice. We can provide them with enough fish to eat or lower their numbers to balance with the amount of fish we are willing to let them have.

Short term need to reduce their numbers. Long-term, we need to holistically plan for how many fish and predators we want.

Best assessment of the problem I've read. Culling seems necessary at this point, but as long as we continue to harvest fish to the MSY, things will remain out of balance. There's a reason God put so many salmon in our rivers in the first place: that's what was necessary to maintain balance, throughout their range. We are the predator that has messed up the balance, not the sea lions.

REAL predator control is LONG overdue

Sea lions were always a problem, somewhere else.....Ballard Locks, Oregon coast, San Francisco, and other places....now they are a problem in Grays Harbor, Westport boat basin, Chehalis marine area and more so in the Chehalis River and in the lower Wynoochee River and the Satsop River.

I watched for a few days, tribal netter, above the 101 bridge, South side of the river.......person running the net, never had a chance....2 sea lions, one on the inside and other on the outside....they'd swim back and forth, fish hit that net, before the person had a chance....sea lion had that fish and away they went.

Grays Harbor doesn't have many sea lions, like other areas, hopefully they won't get to be a problem?????

Up in Dungeness Bay the pinnipeds learned to use set nets. They would chase a salmon (generally coho) into the net. Then, pull it out and eat it.

To throw some recent science into the fray, Northwestern Naturalist has an article about Harbor Seal diet. The article is in the Spring '17 issue. The author looked at papers published from 1931-2013 and included WA, OR, and CA; including southern Puget Sound. Obviously, lots of issues with sample sizes, changes over 80+ years, and so on. But, more than 75% of the studies were from WA.

The thing that surprised me the most is that the overall dominant foods were hake, herring, anchovy, eulachon, pollack. Salmon were generally a minor component.

One really interesting study, in the Alsea of OR, had 50% of the scat with salmonids at a site 2 km above the mouth while scat at the mouth had 8%.

It looks like the Harbor Seals prefer fish other than salmon but take what's around.

The following is a post I made on a concurrent thread and includes links to several other studies which show a significant predation by harbor seals in Puget Sound:


I am wishing Puget Pounder good luck! He'll need it with a 78% mortality rate!!

Here is a link to their preliminary report as presented to the Commission in August 2015:

http://wdfw.wa.gov/commission/meetings/2015/08/aug0715_06_presentation.pdf.

The Puget Sound Recreational Fishing Enhancement Program and the Squaxin tribe are collaborating on a study whereby tagged coho are being released at several locations leading out of South Sound
to Admiralty Inlet to ascertain if predation decreases the further out the fish are released (and presumably the comparative differences).

And then there is the recently released report on a Canadian study which shows the extent of harbor seal predation on Chinook in Puget Sound; twice what Orcas consume and six times what fishers take. Here is the abstract:

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjfas-2016-0203#.WObC2zvysdW

Again, I wish Puget Pounder well as he faces a truly hostile marine environment called Puget Sound.

And I also wish that NOAA would take ownership of how this predation adversly impacts the potential recovery of ESA listed salmonids and push Congress for changes to the MMPA.


One comment is that both perspectives may be accurate. Seals may have other food sources higher on their menu than salmonids but with some 18,000 harbor seals in P.S. consuming over 30 MM pounds of food a year even five or ten percent can be a huge number of salmonids and particularly smolt. And that is just harbor seals - not including sea lions and Stellars.

It is a numbers game. The paper I read notes that, for example, lamprey seemed to be a preferred food. So, we wipe out lampreys. The seals eat anchovy, herring, hake, pollack, so we fish the **ck out of them. And then wonder why they eat salmon. Oh, and we knock the number of salmon down to 10-20% of historic. If that.

The final capper is that the folks who adore seals want them left alone so the "overpopulate" in relationship to the available food. Same with the Killer Whales. Society wants lots of them, just wants them to be vegan because society wants too eat all the same fish. Or, build cities.....

As I said before, we need a holistic solution. I fear that there are more people with more money who will support cuddly mammals over cold-blooded fish.

And, while I am not disagreeing that we need to bring the predators into a balance, whether it be whales, seals, wolves, terns, cormorants I don't agree that the solution is always to kill the predators and leave the prey to me.