San Francisco's Famous Sea Lions Leaving in Droves

Scientists at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Ca., counted more than 1,500 sea lions on Pier 39 last month. This month, however, the story is vastly different. Almost all of the sea lions are gone and experts are baffled as to where they went and why. According to the Associated Press, Jeff Boehm, executive director of the center said the animals began leaving the day after Thanksgiving. He said the fact that so many sea lions stayed for so long is even stranger than their disappearance. Read more:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/29/san-franciscos-famous-sea_n_406702.html

Photo credit: Sea lions at Pier 39, Trip Advisor.

Penguins, Sea Lions Help Produce New Atlas of Patagonian Sea

Recording hundreds of thousands of signals sent by satellite transmitters fitted on penguins, albatrosses, and marine mammals, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Birdlife International have released the first atlas of South America’s Patagonian Sea. The atlas contains the most accurate maps ever assembled for this ecosystem and shows key migratory corridors spanning from coastlines to deep-sea feeding areas off the continental shelf hundreds of miles away.

Data for the atlas was gathered by a team of 25 scientists working over a 10-year period. The team tracked 16 species of marine animals, which produced some 280,000 uplinks of data over the Patagonian Sea, a huge area ranging from southern Brazil to southern Chile. Called Atlas of the Patagonian Sea: Species and Spaces, the 300-page book was edited by Valeria Falabella and Claudio Campagna of WCS, and John Croxall of Birdlife International.   

The atlas, which is in English and Spanish, will be used to help inform policy decisions in the region such as managing fisheries and charting transportation routes of oil tankers. This vast region, which spans 1.1 million square miles, is increasingly threatened by burgeoning development and overfishing.  Article continues

Starving Sea Lions off Chile's Northern Coast May Mark the Herald of "El Nino"

Sea lions on Chile's northern coast are starving to death in unusually high numbers, signaling the weather shift, or El Nino, that is taking hold in the Pacific. The El Nino effect is essentially bring warmer waters to the shores of South America, which is driving away the fish that the sea lions eat. According to Walter Sielfeld, a professor of marine science at Arturo Prat University in Iquique, Chile, the evidence to support this shift is being found in the autopsies of the emaciated pups. They found that the sea-lion pups had empty bellies and no adipose tissue, the fat that insulates their bodies. This warming trend also spells disaster for the country's $4 billion fishing industry, which has already been ravaged by a salmon virus that has had a devastating blow on exporters.

Over the last 30 years, El Nino has sparked deadly floods and landslides from Ecuador to California, caused drought in Africa, wildfires in Australia and caused billions of dollars in damage, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. More than 1,000 sea lions have been found dead, Chile’s national fishery service said in an Aug. 28 statement.This die-off trend is similar to deaths that occurred in California and is among the first concrete effects of El Nino, which starts when warm waters from the western Pacific shifts along the equator to the eastern Pacific. The cool water, which is nutrient-rich, usually wells up from the ocean floor, but becomes blocked. As a result, the fish supply declines sharply or move elsewhere, leaving mammals and seabirds to starve.