Killing the protected animals may be the only way to stop them from eating too many of the Pacific Northwest\u2019s endangered salmon.<\/b>
\nOf 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\u2019ve detonated noisy explosives. They\u2019ve outfitted the docks where the animals like to rest with uncomfortable spinners, electrified mats, flailing tube men, and motion-activated sprinklers. (\u201cVery surprisingly, they don\u2019t like to get wet on land,\u201d 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\u2019 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. \u201cThat\u2019s a devastating amount of fish,\u201d Jeremy Cram, the salmon-recovery coordinator at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me\u2014both for the region\u2019s 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\u2014and 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\u2019 body count to rise. \u201cAsk yourself: Why? Why are these numbers so small?\u201d Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington\u2019s 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\u2019s salmon, more sea lions must go.
Sea lions have never been salmon\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014restricting harvests, remodeling dams, breeding salmon in hatcheries\u2014are yielding diminishing returns. Climate change has made habitat-restoration efforts more challenging, as have pollution from pesticides and even toxic tire dust. Conservationists aim to restore the annual number of returning adult salmon and steelhead to 5 million, but the population, on average, has been stagnant at around 2 million for decades.
Rehabilitating a river can take years to produce an effect, but cull a few sea lions from a dam, \u201cand there\u2019s a benefit the next day,\u201d Clark said. In 2017, winter steelhead populations at Oregon\u2019s Willamette Falls seemed almost certain to soon go extinct, Michael Brown, the marine-mammal program leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me. But after agency officials euthanized 33 adult male sea lions at the falls, the number of steelhead reaching their destination went from hundreds to thousands.
Plus, killing a handful of sea lions can steer many more away from a site. In the same way that they quickly deduce that tube men can\u2019t hurt them (in fact, some animals end up simply cuddling the warm fans that power them), sea lions notice when their peers venture upstream and fail to come back. After the lethal removals at Willamette Falls and the Bonneville Dam began, far fewer sea lions returned to the sites than the number that researchers expected. Nathan Pamplin, the director of external affairs at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me the department estimates that sea-lion removal costs $203 for each fish saved\u2014pricey, but no more expensive than other salmon-recovery efforts.
Still, the process of lethal removal is cumbersome. Under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, sea lions must be euthanized by a trained professional\u2014a process that requires trapping the animals, which can weigh up to 2,000 pounds, then herding them onto a barge for transfer to a nearby facility. Robert DeLong, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher who has studied sea lions for decades, told me that removal teams, which must activate the traps manually, could at first snare the animals during daylight hours. But some sea lions began sneaking out before the sun rose, requiring teams to entrap and handle them under low-light conditions\u2014\u201ca human-safety issue,\u201d he said. A crew of about eight people, working from around 4:30 a.m. until the early afternoon, might be able to trap, kill, and necropsy just two to five sea lions in this manner, Doug Hatch, a fisheries scientist at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, told me.
Gluesenkamp Perez told me she thinks the sea-lion-removal process should be simpler. Her preferred alternative is firearms\u2014\u201cengaging with these animals as animals, and not treating it like a petting zoo,\u201d she said. Currently, shooting sea lions is illegal, but that hasn\u2019t stopped locals from trying. Of the many sea-lion corpses that DeLong has necropsied for research, \u201cthe majority of those animals have pieces of buckshot or bird shot or rifle slugs in their musculature,\u201d he told me. In the mid-aughts, Hatch said, firearms were quickly dismissed as a removal method at the Bonneville Dam because using them would have meant shutting down the interstate highway that runs past the dam, as well as clearing people out of the site, which is open to the public. But some tribes in the Pacific Northwest have been discussing using firearms to harvest sea lions and other pinnipeds for subsistence, as Alaskan Natives do, Cecilia Gobin, a conservation-policy analyst at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, told me. Ultimately, Gobin argues, like Gluesenkamp Perez does, \u201cIf we are going to take these animals, the most humane way seems to be not to trap them, remove them to some off-site location, and euthanize them, but to have more of a targeted kill.\u201d
Before the Marine Mammal Protection Act passed, in 1972, sea lions were in trouble, too. Years of overfishing had depleted their prey, and humans killed them for sustenance or in disputes over fish. But over the past half century, many local populations have rebounded, in large part by chasing their favorite foods inland.
The fact that sea lions are faring better than salmon has made it easier for humans to side with the fish. But regardless, salmon seem to hold more intrinsic value to us. In the state of Washington alone, the annual salmon harvest is worth roughly $14 million. Many Pacific Northwest tribes have subsisted on the fish for millennia and have woven them into their religions and languages. The right to harvest fish is enshrined in their treaties, but \u201cthere\u2019s no way that somebody can sustain themselves as a fisher anymore,\u201d Aja DeCoteau, the executive director of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, told me. Some tribes in the region that traditionally hold First Salmon feasts to welcome the arrival of spring salmon from the ocean have waited for their catch in vain, forcing them to ask other tribes to donate a fish, Gobin said.
Sea lions are also ecologically essential, but not as much as salmon are. Researchers estimate that roughly 140 other species depend on salmon for food; among them are the Pacific Northwest\u2019s critically endangered southern resident orcas\u2014making sea-lion removals \u201cmanagement of a protected species to benefit a protected species, which may then benefit a protected species,\u201d Clark told me.
By law, the number of sea lions that can be lethally removed from the Columbia River basin is far below the number that researchers think would impede the animals\u2019 recovery. But some scientists are hesitant to scale up to even those allowable levels. Although sea lions do appear to be measurably depleting salmon at some sites, including the Bonneville Dam and Willamette Falls, the evidence is shakier elsewhere in the region. Plus, removing sea lions from this delicate system may simply allow another predator to swoop in, including the many birds and other fish that also prey on salmon working their way through ladders. Alejandro Acevedo-Guti\u00e9rrez, a biologist at Western Washington University, told me he worries that pinnipeds have become an inadvertent scapegoat for salmon\u2019s larger issues, simply because sea-lion-on-salmon predation events\u2014loud, violent affairs in which the mammal beats the fish on the surface of the water, then noisily gnaws its flesh\u2014are more visible than the effects of climate change.
Perhaps the sea lions\u2019 greatest crime is indulging in salmon that humans would rather be feasting on. \u201cWe invested so much into all of this,\u201d John North, the deputy fish-division administrator at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me. Decades of work and billions of dollars deep into salmon recovery, humans cannot allow the fish\u2019s comeback to fall apart just because hungry sea lions have swum too far upstream. But salmon protection has never been only about keeping the fish safe. If salmon levels rebound, we can and will eat more of them, Cram said: \u201cThe real predator that those fish would go to is us.\u201d<\/p>\n