[Mike]

NOAA: Beaches full of dead baby sea lions off California, many aborted fetuses —
Garbage bags filled with animals along coast —
Carts in freezer overflowing with bodies —
Official: Pollution may well have had an effect… We deliberately didn’t test for it
Published: June 8th, 2015 at 1:23 pm ET
By ENENews

Yo! Venice, Jun 7, 2015 (emphasis added): The Sad Reality Of Starving, Dying Sea Lions On Venice… [A breeze] catches the scent of dead, rotting sea lion. The pungent stench lingers… It’s hard to ignore… The dead pups are small enough to be tied up tight in black plastic garbage bags. The larger adult sea lions lay out in the open.

Nick Fash, Heal the Bay: “It’s quite frightening… they wash up on our beaches weak and sickened and many cases dying, which is what you see in the bags.”

National Geographic, Jun 5, 2015: Number of Starving Sea Lions in California ‘Unprecedented’… raising questions about what the future holds after three years of mass strandings — More than 3,000 starving sea lion pups have washed up… And those are the lucky pups. The situation on California’s Channel Islands, where more than 90 percent of the U.S. sea lion population congregates to breed and nurse young, is even worse…

“The few pups that have enough strength to leave the rookeries and make it to the mainland get recorded as strandings,” says NOAA’s Mark Lowry… “There’s a lot of death out there.”… When Lowry visited two of the main U.S. sea lion nurseries in April, he found a grim scene. In addition to beaches full of starving or dead pups, there were dead adult female sea lions and many aborted fetuses. “Adult females are taking a hit now,” he says. “What I’m predicting is that pup production—when they start being born in June—is going to be really low.”…

This year, the most likely culprit is that warm water blob… But that blob wasn’t there during the earlier strandings, when oceanographic conditions looked much more normal. It’s also uncertain whether prey populations have died out… Sea lions are considered sentinel species, which means they’re used as indicators of ocean health—and the indications aren’t looking good.

2014-2015 Pacific Anomalies Science and Technology Workshop, May 6, 2015:

Conference Attendee (at 3:42:30): “I’m an ecotoxicologist… We know that pollution, chemical pollution of the oceans, is increasing… [In your research into the sea lion die-off] you should include data like chemical analysis and chemical pollution… We need to include this… to see if it has an influence to the decreasing of the populations.”
No response from any of the dozen Q&A panelists

6 minutes later — Sam McClatchie, NOAA Supervisory Oceanographer: “I have a comment to follow up on the idea that pollution may be important to the condition of the sea lions… In the modeling I did, the purpose was to… have a hypothesis as to what might be going on… We could have thrown in many other variables–and there’s always a temptation to do that… which probably should be discouraged. I’m not at all sure whether pollution had an effect — it might well have — and one could certainly test that. I just wanted to state that we deliberately didn’t test all the possible variables.”

From McClatchie’s sea lion presentation: “I’m going to talk about forage rather than sea lions, I’m not an expert in sea lions… They’re very unwell, rescue centers are overflowing… They’re very endearing, but they grow up to be rather a problem, they’re big animals… People get upset when they see them starving… [Centers] try to recover them [and] put them back out in the ocean. Unfortunately, the ocean hasn’t really changed, so we don’t know whether all these rescues are helping anything more than how we feel.”

Source: http://enenews.com/noaa-beaches-full-dead-babies-california-many-aborted-fetuses-lot-death-scent-rotting-sea-lion-along-coast-garbage-bags-filled-dead-animals-govt-official-pollution-effect-deliberately-didnt-test