Wonderful life for rescued sea lions

Nation & World

After close call, animals enjoying a fresh start at Chicago aquarium

December 7, 2009|By William Mullen, TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS

CHICAGO - Last March, a couple of plump, 900-pound California sea lions showed up once again at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, 146 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.

Their mission? Trying to achieve true obesity - and, by sea lion logic, larger harems-by gorging themselves on a feast of endangered chinook salmon laboring to get over the dam's fish ladder.

The two stinkers had been caught before and branded - literally - as recidivist malefactors by wildlife officials who have spent decadesandbillions of dollars to protect the salmon. So when captured again on March 18, the two culprits faced a federal death penalty.

Only a mercy phone call to the Shedd Aquarium saved their hides.

Now known as Biff and Otis, the two sea lionshave anewhomein Chicago,where they are being tutored to become main-stage stars at the Shedd's Oceanarium marine mammal show, "Fantasea." And it turns out their reprieve from the executioner was a pretty good deal for their appetites, too.

"They lived the life of Riley catching fish at the dam," said Ken Ramirez, the Shedd's vice president of animal collections. "But it was even easier to get fish fromus, so theyweren't upset at all to be hanging around with us."

The first thing visitors notice about Biff and Otis, now slimmed down to their nonbreeding weight of 650 pounds, are the letter "C" and ID numbers branded prominently on their backs. Otis is 507. Biff is 700.

Those are the numbers they were branded with by wildlife rangers who caught the two bandits marauding around the Bonneville dam several years ago.

The Bonneville,built in 1937,was the first of several dams to go up on the Columbia and its tributary rivers for hydroelectric power. The dams and a century of overfishing have taken their toll on ocean fish, such as steelhead trout and salmon, whose reproductive cycles dictate that they return to spawning grounds hundreds of miles upriver to lay and fertilize their eggs.

The California sea lion, also overhunted, was a species down to 10,000 individuals in the 1950s. But the animals have made a dramatic rebound, and 300,000 now dot the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska.

In the 1980s, they began following fish on spawning runs up the Columbia, where sea lions had been seen only rarely in the past.By 2002, big numbers were going all the way to the Bonneville, feasting around the fish ladder built next to the 197-foot-high dam.

The dam attracts only male sea lions, who arrive for the January-through-May salmon spawning runs in order to fatten themselves up before returning to breeding beaches in California and Mexico in June for their own mating season.

At the dam, officials tried for several years to chase off the seals with nonlethal efforts, such as scaring them away with boats, firecrackers and rubber shotgun pellets-all ineffective. In 2008, Oregon, Washington and Idaho officials got federal authority to kill the sea lions by chemical injection.

"This has been fairly controversial," said Craig Bartlett, spokesman for Washington state's fish and wildlife department.

The Shedd had offered to take in animals from the dam as a way to establish a sea lion group. In 2004 it acquired its first sea lion, Tyler, a captive-born 3-year-old.

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