The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has recently issued a warning regarding the increasing number of Guadalupe fur seals dying in the California Coast this year.
According to the agency, this year's incident marks the biggest mortality event for the animals in more than 30 years.
Based on NOAA's reports from 1984 to 2014, around 12 fur seals get stranded a year. However, since January of this year, about 90 fur seals have been found stranded in California. Forty-two of them have already died and 16 have been rehabilitated and returned back to the ocean. The remaining 38, on the other hand, are still not strong enough to be released into the wild.
According to Justin Viezbicke, the stranding coordinator for NOAA Fisheries, the stranded fur seals are mainly young pups and they all appear to be starving, the LA Times reported.
The exact cause behind the conditions of the seals is still unknown but the agency believes it has something to do with what environmental experts have dubbed as "the blob," which is a large mass of warm seawater found on the West Coast.
As explained by the experts, this blob not only affects marine life but commercial fishing activities as well.
Toby Garfield, the director of environmental research for the agency's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, explained that the warm conditions of the blob may have caused the fish that seals and other animals eat to move north.
"We think that warm water conditions have really changed the range of quite a few of the forage fish species that the fur seals would be going after," he said in a statement according to the NBC Bay Area.
Garfield believes this may also be the reason behind the emaciated seabirds found in Washington and Oregon. He then warned that the situation may worsen within the next few months once the El Nino season, which is regarded as a water-warming phenomenon, hits the region.
Guadalupe fur seals can be commonly found on Guadalupe Island near Mexico's Baja California. This is over 600 miles from where they were found stranded in California.
The unusual mortality event declared by NOAA regarding the seals is very concerning especially due to the fact that they are regarded as threatened according to the Endangered Species Act. This animal almost became extinct during the 1800s due to commercial hunting.
Currently, there are around 10,000 to 15,000 Guadalupe fur seals in the world.
