Sea Lions

[Otter-BelleHavenMarina]

And the headline in the Sea Lion Newspaper would be:

"Dinner and a Show at the Bonneville Dam on Thursday and Friday -- Bring the Kids!"

[rogerbum]

[starcrafttom]

Roger the point that you are missing is that the prey predator relation ship is never limited to two species. Man is a part of nature and a big part of the predator prey cycle. the professors say there was some thing like 400,000 natives in the oregon washington area before we got here. thats a lot of people to feed and they were not vegines ( spelling ) .. thats a lot of salmon and a lot of seals, whales, bear elk ......

[rogerbum]

[starcrafttom]

I don’t think that any one is talking about the wholesale killing of the entire population of sea lions. Just the removal of problem seal lions that have made it a habit of destroying the endangered runs at their most vulnerable time, entering the hatcheries and fish ladders at dams. To say that it is natural for seals to eat fish by trapping them in fish ladders is just wrong. Maybe the seal lion population should have been kept in check and at a lower level until their food base has recovered. To put the seal before the cart or salmon is just miss management. This was the same mistake that was made by forest managers. They removed the fire protection before removing the fuel that causes damaging fires. The fuel should have been removed first, and then the forest can take care of its self. If the sea lion population is left unchecked before the food base can be provided we will see a crash of both species. Like I said before, doing nothing is not management. I wonder why the harbor seal population has leveled off while the bigger more aggressive competitor has grown??? oh come to a gathering so we can drink and argue. it drives my wife crazy.

p.s. I am also for the removel of nets in the rivers for the same reason. troll only fisheries are the way to go along with fish farms.

[gljjr]

Roger,

You obviously have more training in this area than I do. However I still feel very strongly that Sea Lion populations are too high in the Columbia river area. This is causing far more endangered fish to be harvested than I would like to see. The biggest problem here is that the Sea Lions of that area have learned how easy it is to work the dams and "hog lines". I feel the ONLY way to keep this from completely wiping out the run of fish is to remove SOME sea lions. They are simply too smart to just relocate (they already proved that with Hershel). In addition to that we need to curtail commercial and sport harvest of these fish for this year at least.

Lets look at these numbers. There were reportedly 5,000 Sea Lions and Harber Seals from Bonneville Dam to the mouth of the Columbia as far back as the beginning of March or so. Now if each of them ate 1 Salmon a day for March and April that would be 30,000 fish. However most of them will eat 4 fish a day. That bumps the number up to about 120,000 fish for that 2 month period. Since the run was only supposed to be about 150,000 and the Commercial and Sport anglers have already pulled about 30,000 fish out of the system. What is left of the run?

As you stated the Seals need to eat to survive. But if they completely wipe out the run there won't be anything left to renew the run. I'm seriously concerned that we have gotten to that point with the Columbia river spingers. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I'm off by much. And you are also right in that it would be better for the Seals to hit a balance in numbers to self regulate. Unfortunately that balance may just cause a drastic problem for the dwindling Salmon stocks.

Lets think on this too. There are basically only a few predators of Sea Lions. Sharks, Transient Orcas, and Man. The typical Pugest Sound Orca doesn't eat Seals or Sea Lions. The Sharks are actually pretty few and far between as well since we seem to have wiped them out to near extinction as well. And since the Transient Orcas are also in fairly small numbers that leaves us with the task of striking a balance that the food fish can sustain rather than let "nature" take its course.

In a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about this as we wouldn't have eat salmon so we wouldn't continue to over harvest them. Thus we wouldn't worry about the Seals eating more than the fish population could sustain as the balance would be there to keep things in check. Unfortunately Man has screwed up the balance. They have wiped out the upper predators leaving the middle predators with no checks on the populations. Then we went and said that we were not going to kill them so we'll let their population grow to the point where they eat their preferred food to near extinction. When that has been accomplished it will finally dawn on people that we should have taken care of the problem long ago but were too shortsighted to realize the problem.

[rogerbum]

[TyBoo]

Some of the branded sea lions that have been spotted at B Dam in recent years are home ported in southern California. To control them lethally, it might take a nuke.

I think the reason the critters are worse this year may have something to do with that guy they elected governator down there.

We probably ought to cut the DFW guys a little slack on their efforts. They are trying to come up with ways that private folks can use, as well. Even if it were legal or ethical to blast the sea lions, I don't think I would want to be on the river if all the Thunderjet and Bayliner skippers were packing elephant guns.

[rogerbum]

[gljjr]

Roger,

Unfortunately I can't remember where I read it. But I have seen it more than once. I think I found it in a newspaper article on the low returns of fish for the Columbia this year.

I've also been told that the WDFW doesn't adjust their run predictions for the increased sea lion population. So their models seem to be very outdated to me. But since I don't have good data it is hard to figure this stuff out.

[rogerbum]

Gary,

Since the year-to-year increases in seal and sea lion populations are of order a few percent, not building that into the model probably doesn't affect the run predictions appreciably. There's enough error in the predictions from things we don't know or can't know (like weather) that the minor corrections to the prediction formulae probably wouldn't make a significant improvement the run predictions.

All,

Just for the hell of it, I posted a graph of the run counts for this year and the average of the past 10 years. I put it as the last photo in the SeaDNA album. The last couple of days of the run count have been low but a few days ago was a doozy (6000+ fish in one day!). I looking at the fish cam at Bonneville dam (http://www.nwp.usace.army.mil/op/b/fishcam.asp?rn=04-116) in another browser window and based on what I see right now, today's count will probably be pretty low too. Let keep our fingers crossed for better days in the coming weeks.... Our 2009 fishing season will require it....

Roger on the SeaDNA

[gljjr]

Nice graph! I hear ya on the continued returns. And I really hope they don't open it back up for some reason. It just wouldn't make sense to me to do that.

[dogon dory]

Sorry, Folks - Post Deleted By Author

[rogerbum]

[dogon dory]

Sorry, Folks - Post Deleted By Author