Steller Sea Lions, the Grizzlies of the Sea (Salish Sea Wild)

It's a crisp winter morning as Team SeaDoc heads north from our base on Orcas Island. We're ferrying up the Strait of Georgia on an expedition that our crew is very excited about. We're going to scuba dive in an area where there's an excellent chance of finding stellar sea lions. Stellars are the world's largest species of sea lion. They're huge carnivorous marine mammals that dominate rocky hollows inside the Salish Sea and along the Pacific Coast. Early observers call them sea lions because the males grow furry manes, but when we compare these top predators to equivalent land animals, we think of them as the grizzlies of the sea. For one, it's more scientifically accurate. Stellars are not cats. They're in the suborder which makes them much more closely related to wolves, dogs, and yes, bears. And what's the biggest, baddest bear in our region? The grizz. To see how our comparison holds up, we stopped by the University of Washington's Burke Museum where Jeff Bradley let us pull some awesome looking skulls from their mammology collection. Both the grizzly and the stellar skulls are certainly impressive, each armed with huge jaws and enormous canines. But how do they measure up head to head? Surprise! That's the stellar sea lion on the left. Hello there little bear. Yep, stellar sea lions are bigger than grizzly bears. Female stellars can grow over eight feet long and weigh up to 800 pounds, which is larger than most grizzlies. But that's nothing. The bull stellar sea lion can grow to be more than 10 feet long and weigh more than a ton. That's about twice the weight of a big coastal grizzly. And do we mention those canine teeth? Hi, this is Joe Gatos and I'm here with Team SeaDoc including Bob Friel and Marcus Noggle and we're on beautiful Hornby Island. We've taken four ferries to get here today. Why? Because this is the best place in the Salish Sea to see stellar sea lions. And if you want to see stellar sea lions you need to look for them in the wintertime. So one of the things that we're going to have to contend with tomorrow and the next day while we're here is snow. You know what it's like when you wake up after a blizzard and you have to shovel your car out of a snow bank to get to work? Well, we have the marine version of that going on this morning. With about 18 inches of fresh snow and temperatures so cold the water in the bay actually froze. The great crew at Hornby Island Diving whips out their shovels and what looked like an iceberg on the dock reveals itself to be our dive boat. And as soon as they excavate our scuba gear our hardy group of snow divers heads out. Going diving in the snow folks. It's going to be awesome. The winter storm has cleared and it's a beautiful day with calm seas. The conditions are perfect. Lambert Channel is a vital spawning area for herring and every kind of swimming, flying, and paddling predator is attracted to this protein party. That's why the stellars congregate here in big numbers every winter. But even though these sea lions are near the top of the Salish Sea's food chain they're not at the very top. Just a few days before we arrived on Hornby a group of transient killer whales identified as the T101s hunted down and killed a stellar sea lion right where we're going to dive. The T101 pod still known to be in the area there's a real question of whether the sea lions, if they're even still here, will feel confident enough to leave the of the rocks and check us out. Here we are at Norris Rocks and yes there are sea lions, hundreds of them. A mixture of stellar sea lions and California sea lions. We're going to get in the water with these grizzly bears of the Salish Sea. We don't know if they'll come up to us but if they don't plenty for us to look at but if they do it's going to be wild. The water is a chilly 46 degrees Fahrenheit but the visibility is excellent as we start our dive. After being heavily called by bounty hunters down to a fraction of their original population the stellars of the eastern north pacific were protected in the 1970s. Since then stellar numbers have really bounced back in the Salish Sea but they're still under threat from toxic pollution in their food chain, the risk of oil spills, loss of prey species and entanglements. Marine regulations mean we're not allowed to approach them without the special permits we use for research and disentanglement missions. Since on this expedition we're just here to observe we'll have to let the sea lions come to us. It's all up to them. Several minutes into the dive and still no sign of sea lions but the waters around Norris rocks are filled with life. Sea stars and urchins cling to the rocks along with several different kinds of colorful anemones. We find a Puget Sound king crab, one of our favorite species. Then we catch sight of this spiky little fellow, a heart crab. The painted greenling is a bold little fish that poses for the camera. However he's about the only fish we see which is very strange for such rich waters where you expect to see plenty of larger fish. Finally there's a copper rockfish. These guys are usually very curious about divers and follow us around but this one's wedged a narrow crack and seems abnormally shy. We poke around some more. Mystery solved. The deep crevices in the reef are chock full of copper quillback and tiger rockfish along with lingcod. These are smart fish. They know all about the grizzlies of the sea. The stellars hauled out just a couple of hundred yards away are mainly here for the herring but these nervous fish are all on the sea lions regular menu. They'll play it safe until the stellars move on in the spring. A few minutes later we suddenly have the feeling we're being watched. At first they're wary. Seems like this one is a scout sent to look us over while the others hang back. The first thing you notice about stellar sea lions underwater is how amazingly graceful they are. Us divers need about a hundred pounds of complicated gear to turn us into a temporary form of marine mammal but when you see the real thing literally flying circles around you, you realize that even the best divers are pale imitation. After a couple of tentative flybys the signal apparently goes out that we're okay and a whole herd of sea lions dives down to check us out up close. Really close. Really really close. While their long flippers can propel them through the water like half ton hummingbirds and even let them out sprint a man on land, they're not much good for handling objects. The stellars have only their sensitive whiskers and their mouths to feel and to test what we're made of. They quickly figure out that we're not prey and we're not predators. Instead it seems like they've decided that we're play toys, more precisely chew toys. While the sea lions entertain themselves by tugging at our gear we make some important observations. We see two stellars with research brands and we record them as part of a migration study. We also note that the pox lesions reported in the young of this colony last year seem to have cleared up. We spot one unfortunate sea lion entangled with a discarded plastic packing band around its neck. We'll report that to the Vancouver Aquarium and hopefully be able to mount a rescue mission in the future to cut it free. This is a common man-made cause of sea lion fatalities. We all need to remember to cut packing bands, keep track of our fishing gear, recycle everything we can and never let plastic wind up in the ocean. We also witness some fascinating behaviors. We see a young stellar purposefully swallow a rock. Scientists aren't certain why they find stones in sea lion stomachs but this is at least anecdotal evidence that they don't get there by accident. Probably the most fun though, aside from getting to be pinniped play toys, is just watching all of the exuberant activity. The sea lions even play catch using sea cucumbers and nudibranchs. It becomes obvious that at least with the females and sub-adult sea lions that spend time with us, they're less like grizzly bears than they are another member of that same animal family. It's more like we're surrounded by a pack of 600 pound puppy dogs. The stellars are able to do dive after dive. They can hold their breath for more than 12 minutes and swim down to nearly 1,500 feet deep and they never seem to tire of playing with us. Our air tanks, however, run low way too soon. The sea lions escorted us back to the boat. They seem disappointed to lose their bubbly chew toys. As for us, we're anything but disappointed in how our stellar expedition has turned out. It's been wild!