Sea Lions Gobbling up Sturgeon

[buckhorn2]

Headlines in the Oregonian today told about the sae lions at Bonnieville. It said the sea lions were gobbling up the stugeon. It said they estimated they ate 800 sturgeon last year but expect they will eat more this year as the sea lion population gets bigger at the dam. They can trap the california sea lions but not the stellars that they say eat 98 per-cent of the sturgeon because they come under the endangered species act. The real bad thing is that the sturgeon they are eating are up at bonnieville to spawn and the dam makes an artificial barrier so the fish congegrate and the sea lions just keep eating and eating and eating. It just seems like everything that eats everything that we like to hunt or fish is in some way protected like wolves; mountain lions sea lions.

[robodad]

It does seem that the animals that are at the top of their food chain are either protected like, People, Eagles, Wolves, Sea Lions, etc.... but are also inedible.

[Gobble]

Saw a dead sea lion on the beach in Copalis this weekend, now if we could add a few more to that we could save some fish

[GEARHEAD]

that number is i think low, from just the dam area alone, it was reported that 6 a day were being killed. not little ones, The sealions are going after the 7-9 footers. appearantly, they can discriminate between male and female, and kill the fish just for the eggs. they don't actually eat the fish, i guess their tribal they do this with the salmon at the dam as well, they can tell which ones have eggs. so their actuall impact is really double, since their prey are almost all female. thats about 9 percent of the hens annually at the dam.
i saw a news clip of a sealion wrestling with a sturgeon atleast 9 feet long a couple years ago, but while showing this footage they were reporting that they were only eating salmon. Lol.
Last i checked there are 365 days in a year, multiply that by how many seals, and by how many seal meals daily, and the number is actually pretty huge.

[TONTO]

It's not just at the dam,a few years ago while fishing near Tounge Point I had a very large bull lion with a very large sturgeon swimming all around my boat.The fish was atleast 8ft,every now and then it would slip away but the lion would dive and bring it back up,it eventualy shreaded it.

[huntnphool]

I fish Tongue Point a lot as well and have seen several lions bring fish up and rip out the bellies

[skipper]

They need to start killing more of them 

[fc2038]

Check these numbers out. These are the latest OBSERVATIONS with numbers of sturgeon and salmon killed by sea lions. they even broke down the species. Looks like the Stellers are the ones that are killing all the sturgeon.

http://www.nwd-wc.usace.army.mil/tmt/documents/fish/2009/update20090327.pdf

that is almost 1000 sturgeon killed this year alone

[WDFW Hates ME!!!]

To bad we couldn't put shock collars on the sea lions and put up a barrier at bouy 10 that would shock them. Kind of like a perimeter fence for a dog.

[huntnphool]

They need to just kill them. The ones that are showing up are similar to those that were feeding at the Ballard Locks, they were the sick/older lions that couldn't hunt out at sea anymore, they would survive and found a way to stay alive and not put out too much energy.

[GEARHEAD]

I thought they finally got approval to kill these guys, but i feel regardless of what the feds say and what state biologists recommend, those troublesome sealions will never be killed as long as we have the likes of that bitch in olypee-ya, running things.

[Pathfinder101]

I think they did get approval at some point, but the feds squashed it.  Sea lions are federally "endangered" regardless of how many there are in WA...

[fc2038]

They have approval and have taken 5 this year. I think most of them were euthanized. I know they were trying to send them to zoos if they were healthy enough. Only problem is the Stellers are taking all of the sturgeon and are OFF Limits. Only the Californians get the needle.

[Pathfinder101]

That's interesting.  2 different species of Sea Lion?  Didn't know that.

[fc2038]

Path---

 here is the link you should check it out. they break down what is being killed (observations) by species 
http://www.nwd-wc.usace.army.mil/tmt/documents/fish/2009/update20090327.pdf