MyBallard has obtained the preliminary results of a necropsy performed on the California sea lion that stranded itself at Golden Gardens. Blunt force trauma appears to be the reason behind the death.
The sea lion, nicknamed Golden, had a fractured sternum that was placing pressure on the heart. That caused some of the small arteries around the heart to rupture, resulting in internal bleeding. There was no evidence that the sea lion had been shot. Cascadia Research issued this statement:
There are a number of circumstances which could have caused the blunt force trauma– boat collision or another type of negative human interaction, transient orca attack, a fight with another sea lion, a fall from a rocky resting spot, etc. The external injuries, which were noted on the beach, were determined to be old wounds that had healed.
More tests are being done and those results may take several months.
Ouch! It must've taken a hell of a blow to break the sternum of a full grown sea lion.
Or was it…..MURDER!
Perhaps he got hit by a gravel truck on burke gilman trail
Aw, poor sea lion. :(
yeah, right he ran a stop sign
I said it before and I'll say it again! Finish the “Missing Link” for both land and sea mammals now!
First it's the whales who can't safely navigate the train tracks under the Ballard Bridge and now we have this tragedy. We all saw this coming and we ALL have blood on our hands for not preventing it.
Or maybe the salmon got sick and tired of being eaten wholesale by those fat, lazy, sea lion bureaucrats and ganged up on him?
Or maybe it really was… shudder… murder.
Perhaps there was nothing that could be done to save this animal and maybe we shouldn't even if we could, but why did we let this obviously sick sea lion suffer for over a day on the beach until NOAA finally got around to check on him? There certainly should be some consideration for some agency to humanely put such an animal out of his misery instead of letting him bleed to death internally.
meh. If it weren't an inhabited beach, he'd have slowly bled to death anyway. Nature's a bitch. It's really not necessary for us to get involved.
That is a good question, but I think nature needs to take its course.
In the not so distant past that sea lion would have either been killed and eaten by local people and/or devoured by birds and other critters almost immediately. It would not have suffered long on the beach. It's only the roping off the area and human intervention to save the animal that prevented nature from taking its course… and prolonged the inevitable.
I know people mean well, but really… what can you do? Nature is cruel.
Transient Orca pod has had its fin prints on a number of recent blunt force stories.
Ride the Orca…