There’s been a lot of news about sea lions in California recently. It started when the famous sea lions at Pier 39 in San Francisco went missing (don’t worry, they’re coming back). Then Oregon wildlife officials started euthanizing sea lions for eating the endangered chinook salmon. Now this from the LA Times, where “starving sea lion pups” are showing up on beaches in Orange County. Many of these stories present the phenomenon as something of a mystery: something unusual is going on with sea lions. A suggestion that it might have something to do with El Niño.

Thanks to the internet (and a proxy to Cal’s library), that can easily be checked. A search for California sea lions from 1998-1999 on LexisNexis reveals:

CONSERVATION officials have found at least 700 pups of the rare New Zealand sea lion dead on a sub-Antarctic island, adding to reports of sea lion deaths in California, Chile and Peru. (The Scotsman, Jan 30 1998)

BABY seals and sea lions, deprived of food by the oceanic warming of El Nino, the weather phenomenon, are dying by the thousand on the islands off southern California. (Times of London, Dec 9 1997)

Note also that, perhaps not coincidentally, this was the year that orcas were first spotted hunting sea otters.