Jane Stevens at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab - We're sad to say that the black-coat elephant seals that were rescued and transferred to the Marine Mammal Center died over the weekend. Mieke Eerkens from the Marine Mammal Center sent us this email: "I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings and that this story didn’t have a happy ending. We are very disappointed, but it’s not entirely surprising, since they were very, very young and it can be hard to raise them away from their mothers successfully at that young age. But another black-coat was rescued on January 11 from Martin’s Beach in San Mateo County, and named Chamomile. We are keeping our fingers crossed for him."

Elephant seal pups, as you can see from these three photos of Chamomile that the Marine Mammal Center sent us, are endlessly cute. He spent a little time sunbathing yesterday, and, when he's not eating a tasty mix of salmon oil and milk, sleeps on a heating pad in a crate.

As Mieke points out, the death of a certain number of pups and adults is inevitable and normal in Nature. But that’s difficult for many people to grasp. (We'll be looking more closely at this in a later blog posting.)
The Marine Mammal Center's goal is to provide a humanitarian response to animals that are suffering. More often than not, the animals that end up at the Marine Mammal Center are affected by humans -- gunshots, pollution, entanglements, etc. Rather than letting them die on beaches, the center will rescue (see the blog posting about the stranded pups' rescue) and rehabilitate marine mammals with the goal of returning the healthy ones back to the sea, or humanely euthanize those animals with no chance of survival. While working with these animals, the center’s researchers also learn a lot about marine mammal and ocean health. One study on domoic acid poisoning has revealed that many sea lions suffer from brain damage as a result of eating fish that have ingested the toxic algae.