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A team of marine mammal experts had spent several days in Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, searching for a sea lion with an orange rope wrapped around its neck. As the sun set Dec 8, they were packing up, for good, when a call came in.The tangled animal, a female Steller sea lion weighing 330 pounds, had been spotted on a dock in front of an inn, leading into the bay in southwestern Canada. The rope was wrenched four times around her neck, carving a deep gash. Without help, the sea lion would die.The team had been trying to find the sea lion for a month, and on that day, with daylight running out, the nine members that day knew they needed to work fast. They relaunched their boats and a team member loaded a dart gun and shot her with a sedative. “Launching the dart is the easiest part of the whole operation,” said Martin Haulena, executive director of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society, which conducted the rescue alongside Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “It’s everything that happens after that, that you just have no control over.”Steller sea lions, also known as northern sea lions, are the largest such breed. They are found as far south as Northern California and in parts of Russia and Japan. The Cowichan Tribes Marine Monitoring Team assisted the rescue society, calling it whenever the sea lion was spotted. The tribe named her Stl’eluqum, meaning “fierce” or “exceptional” in Hul’q’umi’num’, an indigenous language, according to the rescue society. After Stl’eluqum was sedated, she jumped from the dock into the water. Recent torrential rains had stirred up debris, making the water brown, and harder to spot the sea lion, Haulena said.Several minutes after the sea lion dived into the bay, the drone spotted her and the team moved in. The rope had multiple strands and it was wrapped so deeply that she most likely wasn’t able to eat, Haulena said. At first, the team had trouble freeing her. “You couldn’t see it because it was way dug in underneath the skin and blubber of the animal,” Haulena said.After unravelling the rope, the team tagged her flipper, gave her some antibiotics and released her. The Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society searched for several days for the sea lion. The call that led them to Stl’eluqum came from the Cowichan Tribes, Haulena said.
