Sea Lions

TyBoo

TyBoo

Administrator
Staff member
This would be fun to watch. Five government agencies taking part in an effort in futility.


Media advisory

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Federal and state agencies to assess sea lion hazing methods

PORTLAND - A multi-agency operation to research the effectiveness of non-injurious methods of hazing sea lions will take place this week in the tailrace area immediately below Bonneville Dam. The two-day project is expected to begin mid-morning Thursday and end mid-afternoon Friday. All activities will take place during daylight hours.

The hazing assessment will be led by NOAA Fisheries and will involve the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Washington and Oregon departments of fish and wildlife, and the Oregon State Police.

Plans call for operating four boats in the tailrace area of Bonneville Dam, a part of the river usually off limits to all boats for safety reasons. The boats participating in the assessment are being supplied by NOAA Fisheries, the two state wildlife agencies and OSP. Because the operation will take place immediately downriver of the dam while the spillways are open, all four boats must first pass a Coast Guard inspection. Three boats will be used for hazing, and the fourth will serve as a safety boat. Each of the hazing boats will be staffed with a pilot, a hazing operator and a monitor.

The effort will begin with agency staff using noise-making, flare-type guns and percussive devices from the top of the dam to startle sea lions into moving away from the area. Once the sea lions have moved far enough away from the dam and fish ladder, the four boats will launch and begin attempting to drive the sea lions farther downriver with the use of additional non-injurious acoustic and percussive devices.

Monitors on each of the three hazing boats will record the effectiveness of the hazing methods by watching how far and how long sea lions move away from the dam. The goal is to learn whether any of the deterrents will encourage sea lions to permanently leave the area.


###


Notes to media

Most of the boat activity is scheduled to take place on the Washington side of the river below Powerhouse 2. The best locations for viewing the effort are expected to be along the frontage road that parallels Washington SR 14 or at the boat ramp area.

One or more representatives from some of the participating agencies will be available at the boat ramp to answer questions Thursday, 1-3 p.m., and Friday, 10 a.m. - noon. For on-site information during those times call 503-702-4407.


General agency contacts for background information (not on-site information):

NOAA Fisheries: Brian Gorman, 206-526-6613
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife: Margaret Ainscough, 360-902-2408
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife: Ann Snyder, 503-947-6010
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Diana Fredlund, 503-808-4510
 
Sounds like Monkey Football to me.... :disgust

Hazing is illegal here on the Right Coast, at least at the Military Academies and Institutions of Higher Learning. :) Probably extends to Marine Mammals as well. Maybe we should alert Greenpeace? Oh, wait, no let's not do that! :thdown Not only that, they're offering "viewing", maybe they can sell tickets to defer the cost...

I can only guess who will win this one, and it won't be the Government Agencies. Wonder how much of our taxpayer dollars this cost? :crook

If we could talk 'em into same sex marriages, they'd die out naturally. Or at least get so frustrated, they'd go somewhere else.... Like San Francisco....OH, bet that gets me a blast! :crook

Charlie
 
sheesh, I wonder how long it will take them to haze them down to you Mike? I hope nobody gets hurt in this boondogle...Fools, don't they know all they need to do is to truck some Orcas up there and turn um lose.....or...haze some Orcas upriver
 
What a bunch of taxpayer funded crap.
We recently read an article about an endangered species fly costing some California town millions of dollars in a preservation effort.

We are by no means immune.
In fact, we were denied a building permit on a waterfront lot here in the keys because a certain species of mouse "might" like to live there.

Millions of species have come and gone, just look at the fossils in the rocks.

Go figure.

Larry
Florida Keys
 
Yes, seems they spend all their time screwing up the crabbing season based on fake science and fooling around with the sea lions...isn't anybody (besides Mike) watching these clowns?
 
I don't know how many of you have been at the Bonneville fish ladder watching salmon through the windows under the water but can you imagine the shock of seeing an 800 pound sea lion thru the glass working his way upstream!!???

Chuck
 
That would be a sight, ever been to the hatchery and looked eye to eye at the sturgeon? Those sea lions munching on a few salmon doesn't bother me to much, but when they took to munching on oversized sturgeon.....that's another story. When a 40 to 60 year old fish that's critical to the continuation of the fishery is lost, that's a big loss....along the same vein, I think the oversized sturgeon fishery should be closed down.
 
What pople fail to under stand is that when the salmon population was at its highest, per white guy or p.w.g., the sealion population was keep under control by the other population of salmon eating mammals of the great north west.. the tribes. well since we installed a mc ducks on every corner there is no reason to hunt seals. but that leaves us with a problem. the seal population, which is not hunted by man white or other wise, is out breeding the salmon population. and yes over harvest in the last century along with logging and damms did a really good job of declining the stocks. We have changed the logging industry( whats left of it) and there is hardly any commercal fishery compared to what we once had (still to much) and unless you all are going off line at home and work or join me in opening a atomic reactor soon the dams are not going anywhere. So that leaves us with managing the resourses. We are not allowed to manage the resourses under the marine animal protection act and until that happens the stocks of salmon and steelhand on the west coast will not recover. In-action is not management. The same inaction by 'well meaning" groups lead to the burning of large parts of are forest in the last ten years. we have a duty as the number one speices to manage the resourse of the planet. not ignore them or "let nature take its course" ( side not we are nature unless you thing we are aliens) As some would do. So with that said let the hunt start. So i will need tuna rod with 400lbs test line and a bigger net.
 
Last year I had a sea lion take a salmon that I had on my line (which happens all the time) that made a big mistake. Usually they are very good at avoiding the hooks but this big bull ended up with an orange pixie stuck right in the corner of his mouth. He surfaced and bellowed loud enough to be heard for miles and stayed on the surface beating his head against the water, hollering the whole time. After about 10 seconds he went underwater then resurfaced and repeated the performance, all the while with my pretty lure was whipping back and forth from his lip.
 
When the hunting ban was put on the marine mammals in the '70's there were something like 5,000- 10,000 sea lions on the west coast. Today there are over 330,000 from what I read a couple months ago. Tom is right. We need to start thinning the population. Man has historically been the major predator of seals and sea lions. But we went and passed a law saying it is illegal to hunt them. Getting that law changed is going to be tough as it is a Federal Law. I just read that the tribes have just asked for a permit to shoot the sea lions in the Columbia next year. This could be a MAJOR benefit to the Salmon runs if it goes through! I also feel this is the ONLY way we will be able to get around the law passed in the '70's.
 
gljjr":30bzrdku said:
When the hunting ban was put on the marine mammals in the '70's there were something like 5,000- 10,000 sea lions on the west coast. Today there are over 330,000 from what I read a couple months ago. Tom is right. We need to start thinning the population. Man has historically been the major predator of seals and sea lions.
Click to expand...

Historically back to when?! We're relatively recent to this continent (white and "native" both). I hate to be the disagreeable one here, but it seems like we're a bit quick to blame the animals and assume that we can fix the problem by killing the sea lions. The only thing I'm fairly certain history shows is that mankind is pretty good at screwing things up...

While there is good science (http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/relea ... 9r107.html)
to show that Sea lion populations:
1) have increased about 3 fold since the 1970 and
2) can have a significant impact on the salmon population

It is not at all clear that the open season on sea lions proposed by some above is a good or sensible answer. I'd be willing to bet that if you go back 300 years, both the sea lion AND the salmon populations were quite a bit larger than today's. I'd also note that salmon populations lately (with the notable exception of 2005 springers on the Columbia) are generally higher than when I first moved to Seattle 13 years ago. It could be that the seal and sea lion increases are (at least partially) due to the increases in salmon and should be viewed as a good indicator that we are doing the right things. Without meddling by humans, predator-prey populations seem to have a good way of self regulating the relative sizes.

Just my two cents worth....

Roger on the SeaDNA
 
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 ......
 
starcrafttom":2g3gfopz said:
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 ......
Click to expand...

A yet, I'd still be willing to bet that there were more salmon, seals, whales, bears, elk, etc. when it was just natives hunting them.....

I'm well aware that the predator prey relationship is not just limited to two species.... However it is worth noting that for at least for harbor seals (for which there is good population survey data) it would appear that we are nearing the steady state carrying capacity of the environment. That is, the rate of population growth since 1970 is slowing to near zero for harbor seals. See http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/Quarterly/ond2 ... eature.pdf for the data and the mathematical fits to the growth curves. Hence my comment that predator/prey relationships seem to come into balance was based on a both an understanding of the problem and some understanding of the available data (yes, I am one of those professor-types - not in zoology but rather in microbiology). It is also worth noting that in addition to the ESA listing in the 1970's, the 1960's saw an end to state sponsored hunting to reduce the population to the supposed benefit of the commerical fishing fleet and both of these two things contributed to the recovery of the seal and sea lion populations.

My goal is to give some reasoned counter-point to the calls for culling the population so that we can all have more salmon for our fishing. The seals and sea lions are just now recovering to what the present day environment can carry and I think it's a bit premature to suggest that we should start culling the population. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE to fish and I LOVE to catch salmon. But if I was given the choice between "not fishing/catch and release only" or "killing seals and sea lions", I'd pick the former every time. I have a lot of options on what I can eat and where I can get it. Ditto for entertainment. The seals and seal lions don't have this luxury.

I would also claim that in the vast majority of instances in which mankind has thought it would be best for one species to kill or cull another, things haven't worked out well.

Roger on the SeaDNA
 
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.
 
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