Ailing sea lion is rescued
Published: May 23, 2007
An adult sea lion, sick and disoriented, was captured this week at the very edge of Culver City, having made her way for miles through the concrete channel of Ballona Creek.
The sea lion was being treated Thursday at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, after a journey that took her from the open ocean into the sprawl of the city. Her rescuers said she displayed the telltale symptoms of poisoning by a toxic algae bloom off the coast.
It was “way too early” to say whether she will recover, said David Bard, the center’s director of operations.
The sea lion got lost as long as a week ago in the Ballona Creek flood-control channel, a shallow waterway with steeply sloping, concrete sides. Delirious, she kept going, passing beneath busy Lincoln Boulevard, then the Marina (90) Freeway, and then Inglewood Boulevard.
A man out for a stroll spotted her near there Wednesday evening and called the Whale Rescue Team. The sea lion was lying in a few feet of water at the edge of the channel when the group’s president, Peter Wallerstein, arrived.
He estimated that she was about 5 feet long and weighed about 175 pounds, the right size for a 3-year-old sea lion. And he could see that she was in poor health, dazed and lethargic. “She had no idea what was going on,” he said.
Dozens of sea lions have come ashore with the same symptoms in recent months, victims of a toxin called domoic acid released by algae blooming off the coast. Scientists are trying to determine what causes the life-threatening blooms, and say this year has been one of the worst.
Wallerstein knew even the few feet of water in the channel would give the sea lion an advantage if he tried to trap it. He figured he’d have to return in the morning, when the tide had gone out and he could use dry spots to cut off her escape.
But then, the sea lion lifted herself up and pulled herself halfway up the concrete slope. She stopped, lied down, rested and then hauled herself on her front flippers to a bike path along the channel.
Wallerstein warned away a small crowd of bicyclists and dog walkers that had gathered to watch. Then he slipped a net over the sea lion, got her into a cage and put the cage in his truck.
“The poor animal didn’t struggle a bit,” he said.
He drove her to the care center early Thursday morning, where she was being treated with other sea lions suffering from the effects of domoic acid. She was in a dry pen, the threat of seizures making it too dangerous to put her in a pool.
Wallerstein believes the sea lion was the same one reported last week just inside the mouth of the channel. In the days that followed, he estimates that she traveled about 7 miles from the ocean to the stretch of concrete where she paused Wednesday evening.
He guesses that she was so disoriented by the toxins in her brain that she had no idea she was moving away from the ocean, and would have just kept going. In his 22 years of doing this, he’s rescued a handful of other wayward sea lions who had made it so far inland.
Further, in fact. “I’m probably the only person in the world,” he says, “who can say he’s rescued sea lions in Gardena.”
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