Killing the protected animals may be the only way to stop them from eating too many of the Pacific Northwest’s endangered salmon.
Of all the schemes that humans have devised to keep sea lions from gorging on the salmon of the Columbia River basin, none has worked for long. Local officials and researchers have chased sea lions with boats and peppered them with rubber bullets; they’ve detonated noisy explosives. They’ve outfitted the docks where the animals like to rest with uncomfortable spinners, electrified mats, flailing tube men, and motion-activated sprinklers. (“Very surprisingly, they don’t like to get wet on land,” Casey Clark, a marine-mammal biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me.) At one point, the Port of Astoria dispatched a 32-foot fiberglass replica of sea lions’ primary predator, the orca, outfitted with real orca sounds, that almost immediately capsized. Scientists have captured sea lions and released them thousands of miles away, as far as Southern California. No matter the tactic, the result is largely the same: Within weeks, or sometimes even hours, the sea lions swim right back.
The waterways of the Columbia River basin, full of dams that corral salmon in tight spaces, are just too easy of a hunting ground for the sea lions to spurn. In especially hard-hit sections of the Columbia River, sea lions have eaten close to half of the spring Chinook run. “That’s a devastating amount of fish,” Jeremy Cram, the salmon-recovery coordinator at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me—both for the region’s highly vulnerable fish and for the humans who want to catch and eat them.
So in recent years, officials made sea-lion removals more permanent, which is to say, more deadly. Since 2020, the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, as well as a handful of local tribes, have trapped and euthanized more than 200 sea lions in and around the Columbia River—and have still fallen short of the limits allowed by federal law. With sea lions still eating thousands of salmon each spring at sites such as the Bonneville Dam, near Portland, some local fishers, tribal members, and politicians are pushing for the mammals’ body count to rise. “Ask yourself: Why? Why are these numbers so small?” Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington’s Third Congressional District, said at a hearing about the sea lions last month.
Not everyone agrees that more kills are needed. But at this point, all else has failed. To preserve the region’s salmon, more sea lions must go.
Sea lions have never been salmon’s primary threat: That honor belongs to us. More than a century of overfishing, industrialization, and hatchery mismanagement has brought several populations of salmon and their close relative the steelhead to critically low levels in the Pacific Northwest. To spawn, salmon must swim hundreds or even thousands of miles upstream from the ocean, and in the Columbia River and its many tributaries, their path is obstructed by a massive network of hydroelectric dams. Ladders can help fish circumvent these obstacles, but learning to navigate them can take the animals days. In a highly built world, salmon have a far harder time reproducing and surviving than they used to have.
Over the past 40 years, the United States has poured $9 billion into reversing the basin’s salmon and steelhead declines and currently spends more on those efforts than on any other endangered animal in the country. But efforts to mitigate human harms—restricting harvests, remodeling dams, breeding salmon in hatcheries—are yielding diminishing returns.
