SANTA ANA, Calif. — When Balboa Island resident Barbara De La Pena looked out her window and saw Newport Beach city workers prepping to bury a dead sea lion on the sand in front of her home, she stopped them.
Over two decades, De La Pena has seen her share of sea life, including a baby sea lion pup at her back patio door. An avid animal lover, she’s also witnessed strandings, sick animals and occasionally dead marine mammals, and she’s been in touch with city workers about the proper care. But when she saw the large adult sea lion lifted by a backhoe from the sand to a deep hole, she ran out.
“I said that the proper disposal should include a call to Pacific Marine Mammal Center,” De La Pena said. The Newport Beach resident has long been a fan of the rescue work the Laguna Beach center does and kept tabs on how it’s broadened out to research overall ocean health.
As a recent effort to dig deeper into what threatens marine life and the ocean environment, PMMC is asking local municipalities along the Orange County coastline to notify it about struggling sea life and any found dead.
By De La Pena stepping up, PMMC not only did a necropsy and determined why the animal died, but also solved its own mystery.
Days before De La Pena’s intervention, the center’s rescue team had reports of a listless and extremely skinny sea lion hanging out near the cannery in Newport Harbor. It was also seen floating at the water’s surface in the busy harbor, and PMMC veterinarian Dr. Alissa Deming worried the sea lion was so weak that he would be hit by a boat. She dispatched a rescue team to go and look for the animal, but there was no sign of it over several days.
“Without Barbara stopping them, we would have never known his outcome,” Deming said, adding the radiographs — something she began routinely doing on all marine mammals in 2021 as part of the center’s expanded research — showed the adult male sea lion had been shot. The shooting, she said, left the animal blind in both eyes, which contributed to his death because he could no longer see to hunt for food.
“He had several bullets and pellets from airsoft riffles in his head,” Deming said. “Two had impacted his eyes. One created damage to his lens, and it was completely whited out. His other eye was totally collapsed and deflated.”
This year, the Marine Mammal Protection Act celebrated its 50th anniversary. Sea lions and other marine mammals are federally protected, and shooting a sea lion violates federal law. The problem, though, is that few of these cases are prosecuted because it’s often tricky to build evidence unless witnesses step forward.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s law enforcement division is tasked with investigating these shootings and is looking into the recent incident in Newport Beach, said Michael Milstein, a spokesman for the federal agency. But the agency can only investigate those that are brought to its attention.
“Of course, there may be more incidents, but if there is no carcass found or reported, we may never hear of them,” Milstein said. “The agency does not track the number of animals with bullets alone, because they may not be related to the cause of death. But the individual stranding network members may track that.”
Typically, the agency relies on marine mammal centers to provide feedback, and not all are using radiographs on all their animals — dead and alive — as Deming is. PMMC began the practice in 2021 as cases of shootings appeared to be increasing and as a way to enhance its overall research.
Furthermore, radiographs make it easy to find bullets in the sometimes 400-pound animals. In 2021, Deming found that 38% of her patients had evidence of being shot; this year so far, the number of affected patients is 28%. Of all strandings, she said, that represented about one in three animals affected by bullets and air pellets.
Most cases, she said, are “incidental findings,” and bullets are found in sub-adult and adult animals where they are not the direct cause of death. But if a bullet strikes a marine mammal in the abdomen and perforates the GI tract, she said that causes “acute and immediate death.”
“We would have missed a lot if we didn’t take radiographs,” she said. “It speaks to how the animals have negative interactions. We don’t know where they come from, and they travel long distances and across international borders.”
Further north, at the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles in San Pedro, veterinarian Dr. Lauren Palmer also documents cases of human interaction, including gunshots. In the past two years, she’s only had three sea lions that were shot, but in each case, the injuries led directly to the animals’ death.
“Because we don’t radiograph every animal, these cases likely underrepresented the magnitude of occurrence,” Palmer said.
SeaWorld San Diego reported two sea lions — rescued from San Diego County beaches — were found with gunshots this year, and two were recovered in 2021.
In the past five years, only one case in which a northern elephant seal was shot and killed near San Simeon was criminally adjudicated, NOAA records show. Then, a reward was posted, and witnesses identified the suspect. A former Santa Maria resident, Jordan Gerbich, pled guilty and was sentenced to three months in federal prison. Upon his release, he was placed on one year of supervision, served a three-month term of home detention, performed 120 hours of community service and paid a $1,000 fine.
According to NOAA’s investigation, Gerbich, on Sept. 29, 2019, drove to an elephant seal viewing area adjacent to the Piedras Blancas Marine Reserve and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Gerbich brought a .45-caliber pistol and, aided with a flashlight, used the firearm to shoot and kill a northern elephant seal as the animal was resting on the beach in the Piedras Blancas rookery. The next day, the elephant seal was discovered on the beach with a bullet hole in its head.
Northern elephant seals — like California sea lions — are a protected species under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. They live up and down North America’s Pacific coast and haul out on land in areas called rookeries. NOAA’s law enforcement branch investigated the case with help from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“In our experience, private fundraising for a reward for information leading to an arrest is the best deterrent for gunshots,” Palmer said.” It doesn’t get the perpetrator caught, but it does cause shooting to decrease.”
For example, she pointed to Peter Wallerstein, who, with his group Marine Animal Rescue in Los Angeles, rescues about 75% of the animals Palmer treats at the San Pedro facility. He has offered $5,000 rewards for information leading to an arrest. Palmer said that when newsgroups picked up reports of the reward, it seemed to slow shooting incidents.
“It makes bad guys look over their shoulder,” Palmer said.
De La Pena was happy she stopped the burial and aided PMMC in its research. But, when she learned from Deming that the sea lion died because he was shot, she was outraged.
“I felt really devastated that the innocent animal was unable to hunt for food and starved to death,” she said. “His reported weight was hundreds of pounds below normal. I was also angry at whoever did this as it is not only inhumane but a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”
Deming and Palmer — with nearly 40 years in marine mammal care combined — still can’t fathom why marine mammals are targeted. Could it be over competition for fish, property or just people being plain mean?
“I can’t say why there are people who do bad things to animals,” Deming said. “Nature is hard enough, and it’s frustrating seeing (gunshots) in healthy animals that have made it through the tough phases of navigating the wild.”
“The Marine Mammal Protection Act in the U.S. makes this one of the most-protected countries of the world,” she added. “If that happens in the U.S., it may be an even bigger problem in countries where they are not protected.”
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