Okay, let's say good morning now to Dave Bader at the Marine Mammal Care Center. Good morning, Dave, Good morning, So thanks so much for taking some time to talk to us today. This is just so heartbreaking to see what's going on that there are all these sick animals. So I wanted to go back, tell us what's going on that's making these animals sick, and then we'll talk about what we do when we encounter them.
Yeah, thank you. We have a harmful algabum that's off the coast of Los Angeles right now, actually southern California. It's producing a neurotoxin that builds up in the food chain, gets into dolphins, sea lions and seabirds, causes some really bad symptoms, causes seizures, aggressive behavior, lethargy. The animals are showing up in places where they normally don't show up, and we have a lot of them out there right now.
Okay, and that includes we heard about a surfer being a off the coast of I believe Oxnard over the weekend, and they're saying that they're attributing that and it's not bit by a shark but bit by a sea lion. They're attributing that to the toxin.
Yeah, you can have aggressive behavior. It's a neurotoxin, so it affects their brain. That the animals are not intentionally being aggressive or anything like that, but they're really sick. And it's really important for everybody, and given that news as well, that we stay at least fifty feet away from any marine mammal that we see on the beach, be it a dolphin or a sea lion, and make sure you call your local stranding authority to be able to respond to that animal. For us here in Los Angeles,
that would be eight hundred and three nine whale. And we also have people are calling the Pinniped Control. They're volunteers for the Marine Mammal Care Center that are out on the beaches helping out our responders and helping keep people safe and helping to keep the animal safe as well.
Okay, and now you mentioned a sea lion, which might not be as surprising to see a sea lion up on the beach as it would be a dolphin.
And yeah, is there no sorry, Yeah, we're seeing sea lions in places along our beaches that they're normally not seen, right like right in the middle of you know, some of our busiest beaches where you know, you might see them in Redondo Beach or King Harbor, on the buoys and the docks, but not not on our city beaches. And dolphins as well. They're showing up unfortunately, way too many. And when dolphins strand, they're really unlikely to survive. Many of them have shown up already to cease.
Okay, and then what now, what about the sea lions? Can you treat them?
Yeah? When we get a chance to rescue the sea lions, we bring them back to our center. We give them fluids to help to keep them hydrated as well as wash out any of the toxin that is still remaining. We can give them anti seizure medicines and sedation helps
to keep them calm and RESTful while they're recovering. There's no anti toxin unfortunately, so the best we can do is take care of their symptoms and after a little while, the talksin kind of works its way out of their system and we're able to start to give them clean food, you know, all of the medicines they need, and then hopefully get a chance to release them in the end.
Okay, but with the dolphins, it's a different story because, like you said, by the time they beach themselves, they're probably too far gone.
Yeah, dolphins, if they're sick, they're sick at sea. You know, they don't come to shore ever, and so if one should should be so sick, it winds up on the shore. It's on its way. Okay.
And then Dave, how long are we expecting this to last? And is it a naturally occurring thing or is there something going on that's causing it.
Yeah, these blooms usually last anywhere between six to eight weeks. We're probably around about four weeks right now, so we have a number of weeks left to go. It seems not to be dissipating at all. These blooms. While the algae itself is naturally occurring, they usually only would occur every so often, maybe every four to seven years. We're seeing back to back to back blooms. Last four years we've had an algal bloom of this type and almost
this intensity, and that's not normal. We see that because of climate change, ocean acidification, nutrification of our coastal ocean, we're creating conditions that are favorable for harmful alga blooms. In our case, it's been the last four years and that's really unprecedented.
Is there anything we can do or is it just that's the way it is now because of climate change and that kind of thing.
Yeah, well, we can do things right. Climate change is something that we know is going to be impacting us, you know, worse and worse into the future. But we can mitigate against that. We can choose the future that we want. We can't choose it to not be bad at all, but we can choose how bad it gets by reducing our carbon footprints. And mostly we need to think about adaptation as well. Going to be a new normal for us, and part of that, unfortunately, is going
to be increased marine mammal strandings. So we need to think about our resources and how well resourced we are to respond to these kinds of things. Our local municipalities need to think about that as well and make sure we have the funding resources available to organizations like ours to be able to respond to the new increase in the number of animals that we're going to be seeing on our local beaches comes with increased costs, and the public can help with that as well.
Okay, and Dave, If people want to get more information about your organization, is there a place they can go and check it out.
Yeah. Marine Mammalcare dot org is our website. You'll have information about the bloom right there. You can tell you all about what's happening with the animals. It's also an opportunity, if you feel like it, you can donate to our organization help to pay for the increased costs in medicine and food that we're seeing at this time.
Okay, Dave Bader with the Marine Mammalcare Center, thank you so much for the information. And again, if you do a stranded sea lion or a dolphin, call don't get close to it. Call one eight hundred and thirty nine Whale. Thank you so much.
We appreciate it. Take care, Thank you so much.