Official: At least 5 sea lions shot near Seattle

Breitbart ^ | 2/12/10 | staff

[Mister Muggles]

Was one of them “Herschel?”

[fish hawk]

Hundred hell, how about a few thousand if not more.

[Finny]

Burgeoning sea otter populations are what had a devastating effect on both the abalone fisheries and the Pismo clam populations on the Central Coast. Not sea lions, but sea otters -- sea otters have little paws; they're like hands that give the otters the ability to crack the shells (the use rocks as tools to do it) and dig baby clams out of the sand. Sea lions only have flippers; they eat fish.

Just FYI. :^)

[B Knotts]

You’re right. I confused the two. These guys just devastate our salmon runs.

[TexasTransplant]

Need more Sharks!

[mickey finn]

“Was one of them “Herschel?””

One can only hope.

[Finny]

I hear you! In a way, the "confusion" is just a technicality -- seals or sea otters, they're both terribly destructive! *sigh*

I think maybe what's unusual is that they actually found the carcasses of the shot sea lions! I woudln't doubt that there are plenty shot or otherwise dispatched that are by design never found. Whoever shot these ones screwed up!

[sionnsar]

Say WA? Evergreen State ping

Quick link: WA State Board

FReepmail sionnsar if you want on or off this ping list.
Ping sionnsar if you see a Washington state related thread.

[Justa]

The picture shows the clubbing part. If you look at the harvester’s leg you can see the rod w/ white handle used to stab them.

[Justa]

"California sea lions feed on a wide variety of seafood, mainly squid and fish; sometimes even clams. Commonly eaten fish and squid species include salmon, hake, Pacific whiting, anchovies, herring, schooling fish, rock fish, lamprey, dog fish, and market squid.[9] They feed mostly around the edge of the continental shelf as well as sea mounts, the open ocean and the ocean bottom. Average annual food consumption of males in zoos increases with age to stabilize at approximately 4,000 kg (8,818 lbs)/year by the age of 10 years. Females showed a rapid increase in average annual food consumption until they were 3 years old. Thereafter, females housed outdoors averaged 1,800 kg (3,968 lbs)/year.[10]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Sea_Lion

[Finny]

Well, that's Wikipedia for you, and why I take everything it says with a grain of salt.

I was very gratified when, in the late 1980s, a Fish and Game officer finally admitted officially, for the record, that a resurgence in the sea otter population was the reason for the sudden and drastic decline in Pismo Clams. The admission, however, was made ten years too late and after many years of wrongly blaming their decline on people.

Baby clams are seeded in deeper water where clam diggers never go, even in the lowest tide. As long as there were no sea otters with little paws to dig the baby clams up out of that submerged sandbed, Pismo clams thrived ... for generations, in spite of people digging for them constantly. My mother (who grew up there) remembers farmers ploughing the sand for the clams, which they fed to the pigs. Even that kind of mega-harvesting didn't make a dent in the clam populations.

I wish the Wikipedia entry would explain how an animal with flippers digs up and cracks a clam in order to eat it.