Rehabilitated seal and sea lion return to Sonoma Coast waters

SCOTTY CREEK BEACH - Compared with a California sea lion that sprinted down the beach and into the ocean upon its release moments earlier, a northern elephant seal named Treasure Cove appeared hesitant last month when she was freed to return to the wild at the Sonoma Coast.

The 150-pound pup made halting progress across the sand on her belly, stopping from time-to-time to rest and survey her surroundings. But once she reached the water and was embraced by the incoming surf, the sweet-faced ellie surrendered to the waves and was gone.

It was a poignant experience for more than 100 onlookers at Scotty Creek Beach, just north of Bodega Bay. Some of them applauded softly or cheered to see the healthy elephant seal go home. Several people grew weepy.

“It’s about the coolest thing ever,” said one teary observer, Sausalito resident Robyn Carmel.

Treasure Cove had come a long way since Aug. 7, when she was found in a pathetic state near Glass Beach in Fort Bragg. Weak and underweight, her skin hanging on her bones, she had a jagged stingray barb in her nose and was covered in algae and barnacles, evidence that she had spent time floating around the ocean, unable to dive. She also was dehydrated.

But during five weeks at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, the sharp barb was removed and the elephant seal’s infection treated. A diet of liquid nutrition and, eventually, real fish plumped her up and renewed her strength, according to Shawn Johnson, the facility’s director of veterinary science,

“We haven’t heard anything from her since we released her, so we’re assuming she’s doing well,” he said last week.

Seeing wild creatures return to the ocean, their health and vigor restored, is how the Center’s Executive Director, Jeff Boehm, finds hope amid often dispiriting news about the state of the world’s oceans. It provides a reminder of how resilient nature can be, offering encouragement where much is needed, Boehm told donors and volunteers invited to a private stretch of beach to watch Treasure Cove and a sea lion named Tramonto go home last month.

“They really embody the optimism of the work that we do,” he said.

Treasure Cove, for instance, had appeared close to death when a couple of boys searching for “gems” near Glass Beach stumbled upon her five weeks earlier on a remote band of beach below some steep bluffs about a quarter-mile south of the main beach.

One of 165 elephant seals rescued so far this year, she was way underweight, with a bleeding, infected nose and barnacles around her neck, said Leah Shirley, a Center volunteer who mounted her rescue. “She was really unresponsive. She was so sick,” said Shirley, 29.

When a beachcomber came near and the animal shifted a bit toward the water, “it seemed like it hurt for her to move,” she said.

It required five men to get her off the beach, using a wheeled crate rack called “beach wheels” to push her up the side of the bluff to a bike trail at the top.

Invited to give her a name, the boys, about 8 and 10 years old, decided to call her after the place they call Treasure Cove, Shirley said.

The veterinary staff in Sausalito later found the nearly 2-inch-long stingray barb in her nose, Johnson said. The elephant seal weighed just 121 pounds at about 6 or 7 months old, nearly 30 pounds less than her weight at release.

Boehm said the Center’s mission goes beyond saving individual lives, however, and is part of a broader effort to monitor and understand the state of the world’s oceans as they respond to environmental and atmospheric degradation. “There’s a world of hurt out there,” he said.

Marine mammals like those that come to the facility in the Golden Gate National Recreational Area are often called sentinels of the sea and contribute to education and research, with applications across a range of veterinary and human medicine, fisheries science, ecology and other disciplines, he said. Even the animals that don’t make it can inform progress toward helping the oceans heal.

They provide a “window into our understanding of ocean health, and it plays out patient by patient, season by season,” Boehm said.

The Marine Mammal Center - the world’s largest marine mammal rehabilitation hospital - is now in its 40th year and has taken in more than 20,000 animals during that time. More than 1,200 volunteers aid the center staff, while dozens of others coordinate rescues up and down the coast, including about 12 in Bodega Bay and several in Fort Bragg and Anchor Bay.

The facility is on track this year to accept a record number of ill, injured and dying patients, with at least 1,627 so far and nearly three months to go before year’s end, spokeswoman Laura Sherr said. The record number of animals is 1,631 in 2009.

The vast majority of this year’s patients - more than 1,300 - have been California sea lion pups, which, as a group, have struggled increasingly during each of the past three years. Unusually warm off-shore waters have affected the availability of forage fish that nursing sea lion mothers need to feed themselves and their young in late winter and spring.

Scientists believe adult females have had to swim farther and farther from southern California breeding colonies in search of food, leaving their dependent pups to fend for themselves at too young an age, and causing large-scale malnutrition and death.

Out of more than 1,600 patients of all species admitted this year, just more than 500 animals have been successfully rehabilitated, Sherr said.

But while the losses are painful, the high volume of patients that pass through the center offers opportunities to save those that can be saved and to learn even from the animals that don’t make it.

The recent plight of starving sea lion pups - as well as young Guadalupe fur seals, who have stranded this year in much smaller numbers but at an annual rate five times the record - offers insight into the impact of warming coastal water and its effects on forage fish populations and migrations.

The Center, where scientists first diagnosed domoic acid toxicity in sea lions in 1998, is currently tracking an active outbreak of the potentially deadly neurotoxin, which is produced in harmful algal blooms sometimes called “a red tide” and can become concentrated in marine mammals as it moves up the food chain in fish and shellfish.

Researchers also have documented troubling findings about the presence of toxins in sea lion blubber, including so-called “legacy chemicals” like DDT, a poisonous insecticide now banned for agricultural use worldwide; polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB; and flame-retardant chemicals, Boehm said.

It’s still unclear if the chemicals are linked to a very high rate of uretogenital cancer found in nearly 1 out of 5 California sea lions that perish at the marine mammal center, whatever it may have been that caused their hospitalization, but there are implications for humans to be considered, he said.

“If we weren’t looking at each and every one, these big pictures things wouldn’t be occurring,” Boehm said.

But when an animal recovers and is cleared to return to the wild, it is cause for celebration, though only a very few releases are open to supporters like the one at Scotty Creek Beach.

Treasure Cove’s large bright eyes and plump, well-fed appearance on the day she was freed were in stark contrast to the day she was found. She pressed her nose against the mesh enclosure of her crate and greedily smelled the sea air upon arrival at Scotty Beach.

As was predicted, she moved toward to the ocean like most elephant seals, flopping forward little by little, taking her sweet time.

Volunteers using rescue boards worked their way down the beach, blocking all avenues of escape but the ocean until it was clear Treasure Cove was ocean-bound.

Seeing them go “is emotional,” Boehm said. “It’s inspiring. It’s validating.”

“That for me is the buoyant, uplifting manifestation of what we can do. If we can do it patient by patient, that’s great. If we can do it ocean by ocean, that’s better.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.