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Wednesday, May 07, 2008
By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer

Another dead sea lion turned up in the Columbia River on Tuesday, this one floating past the Interstate 5 Bridge.

It’s unclear whether the sea lion was killed or simply died of natural causes. In the meantime, state and federal authorities reached agreement Tuesday with animal-rights organizations to suspend the trap-and-relocate program at Bonneville Dam, where six sea lions were shot and killed over the weekend.

The Humane Society of the United States, along with the Wild Fish Conservancy, had sued to block a lethal-removal program. While the court system sorted out the legality of killing nuisance sea lions, Washington and Oregon authorities had been trapping and relocating some sea lions to zoos and aquariums across the country.

Now, even that program will be suspended at least until next March.

“We hope this agreement will trigger some thoughtful reflection on the real problems facing salmon — like dams — rather than fostering further lawless and cruel behavior,” Jonathan R. Lovvorn, the organization’s vice president, wrote in an e-mail to The Columbian.

Washington and Oregon authorities had been trapping sea lions in an effort to reduce nuisance animals eating a growing proportion of imperiled salmon at Bonneville Dam.

Police were called at about 10 a.m. Tuesday with a report of a boater who noticed a sea lion carcass floating in the middle of the river under the I-5 Bridge. A Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office river patrol boat pulled the carcass to the sheriff’s boathouse near Portland International Airport, where it will be examined today by investigators.

Until then, authorities can’t say whether it was killed or died naturally.

“We can’t tell anything right offhand,” Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy Travis Gullberg said. “From what I’m hearing, we get six to 12 of these a year. Most end up being natural causes.”

Investigators continued to examine the carcasses of the six sea lions found dead shortly before noon Sunday within floating docks lined with cages near Bonneville Dam. Parts of the animals have been sent for   examination to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Ore.

By suspending the trapping program for now, authorities hope to tamp down inflamed passions.

“Those passions are fairly strong at the fringes,” said Brian Gorman, spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle. “I think most people, however, think that the law ought to be followed, and we ought to do this in a deliberate way — to be deliberate and dispassionate and base our decision on the law and biology.”

State and federal biologists estimate California sea lions ate about 3,900 fish at the dam in 2007, which amounts to about 4.2 percent of all the fish that arrived at the dam from January through the end of May. By comparison, the Humane Society argues, the government permits human fishermen to incidentally kill 12 percent of imperiled Columbia basin salmon and steelhead.

Dams kill even more.

On Monday, the Bush administration released a plan to limit the kill rate of ocean-bound juvenile salmon at each federal dam to no higher than 4 percent in the spring and no more than 7 percent in the summer. For example, a wild fish beginning life in the wilderness of central Idaho passes eight dams on its way to the sea — losing 4 percent to 7 percent of its brethren at each obstacle in the river.

Even so, Gorman said federal fishery managers can’t ignore sea lions’ effect on salmon protected by the Endangered Species Act.

“If we can have control over sea lion predation, which is having a measurable impact, then it seems to me we have an obligation to do that,” he said.