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.

• Some seventy years ago Orwell mused, “Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.”  Indeed!  Four south African nations gear up for only the second ivory auction since the worldwide criminalization of the ivory trade in 1989, according to the BBC.  They hope to raise tens of millions for elephant conservation efforts.  NGOs are fretting the sale’s an incentive to poachers, while TRAFFIC attempts to sooth them with line graphs.  Just a week ago, eBay caved to pressure to drive ivory traffickers out of its virtual vendue; 39,000 frantic sellers have nine weeks to unload their wares.  Did someone say stocking stuffers?
• Searchers are giving up hope of every finding those missing killer whales.  “The population drop is worse than the stock market,” proclaims the Center for Whale Research’s Ken Balcomb, tagging into this bizarre fight eco-doomsayers have picked with the Dow Jones.  But in all seriousness, the remaining number of “southern resident” orcas only just outnumbers the years since Black Friday.
  
• Bright side: The youth of Rotterdam have got Looten Plunder on the run with their (Dance! Dance!) Revolution! Read about here, or better yet head right to Club Watt’s almost erotic promotional video.  (But big party foul with this head-scratching headline.  What was it Aldo Leopold said about growing accustomed to thinking breakfast comes from the market and heat from the furnace?  Apparently, CNN is hoping electricity comes from Eurotrash.)