This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

Notes on the California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus)

1. Their Abundance. The California sea lion is a large and ominously abundant pinniped native to the west coast of North America. They are one of three species actively serving in the United States Navy¹ and a staple of oceanariums worldwide. In the wild they prey on a variety of fish species and their chief predator is the great white shark.² In the 1950s, due to overhunting, the California sea lion population stood at around 10,000 individuals. Owing to successful conservation initiatives under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the current population now approaches 300,000. This population is growing.

Although many marine mammal species globally are in danger of extinction due to factors including habitat destruction, ship strikes, rising sea surface temperatures, changes in the availability of prey species, clinical depression, hunting (in both traditional and commercial-industrial varieties), microplastics, the ravages of war, and fisheries bycatch, California sea lions are abundant, thriving, and increasing throughout their range. They are frequently spotted in large numbers near ports, fishing wharves, beaches, and other human habitations. They demonstrate neither fear nor any particular curiosity regarding human beings, even as their populations continue to encroach upon heavily trafficked beaches, piers, commercial ports, and the decks of people’s boats. For those living on the West Coast, encounters with California sea lions have gone from a rare sighting of an endangered keystone species to a commonplace occurrence. Aside from small groups of concerned citizens and environmental professionals, most people would not consider this a source of worry or disturbance in their lives. Most, shooting from the hip, would say that having more California sea lions around is a good thing. This conclusion follows a sensible hunch, a warmish gut feeling, a nod of solidarity to a comrade in the great struggle of Class Mammalia, a faded old Save the Whales sweater in the Goodwill-bound cardboard box of our soul.³ We look into the eyes of the California sea lion and find a little of ourselves in there. A little sadness, sparks of humor, mostly hunger. What’s the problem here, anyway?

The success of the California sea lion, it turns out, has not come without consequences. As their population grows they spread further inland, into harbors and river channels, far from their shark predators. They have a voracious appetite,⁴ and they excel at locating food sources and capitalizing on new conditions. Because of this, they have become a major driver of the decline of salmonid populations throughout Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. California sea lions have been observed gathering at the mouths of rivers and the fish-passage zones under hydroelectric dams, gobbling endangered salmon by the thousands. This has led to a complex, emotional, and ethically confusing management situation in which environmentalists of various stripes must choose between an economically and culturally essential “eating fish,” the salmon, and a charismatic megafauna, the California sea lion.⁵ In some cases, past protections have undergone an extreme reversal: the Marine Mammal Protection Act, for example, was amended in 1994 to allow for “lethal removal” when sea lions threaten salmon and steelhead. Nuisance sea lions who prey on salmon runs are branded with huge numbers on their backs, scarlet letters alerting the world of their gluttony and greed. And it is permitted, at certain times of year, to execute repeat offenders in the states of Washington and Oregon, even though they are otherwise a protected species and most of them presumably are not aware they are criminals.

The sea lion, for her part, is quite carefree regarding these developments. Like some Biblical settler she has crossed over the great desert of extirpation and arrived at a Promised Land of bountiful rivers, hidden treasures, soft pink sunsets. Her ambitions are simple: to secure fifty pounds of fish per day, and to court a big blubbery male come mating season. Every year so far this has gone exactly as planned. There are plenty of fish in the water and she has enough milk to nurse her pups for nine or ten months, until they are large enough to fish on their own. On a midriver dock in Old Sacramento, some ninety-five miles from the sea, she is hauling herself over the stern of the Joe’s Crab Shack Beer Boat, scrounging around for bait fish and sandwich scraps. Up on the restaurant patio some tourists point and laugh. She shoots them a glance and barks—raucous laughter on the patio—then roots around the tackle some more. A few people take pictures as the chatter dies down. Five minutes later, all have returned to their meals. The sea lion is still on the boat.

2. First Encounter. The first time a California sea lion kissed me I was five or six years old, on a trip with my uncle to the Aquarium at Cologne. This was during a time of great discovery and scholarship, a time when I was more invested in learning about animals (sea animals in particular) than anyone should ever be invested in anything. Inside the computer and sometimes on the kitchen TV there was a great veil of blue I was lifting, an alien world of eyestalks and spiracles and technicolor reefs and vague, bloblike creatures who sailed on icebergs, all of this fresh and glinting in its newness, and myself imbued with a kind of Linnean sense that it was my sole, cosmic responsibility to understand it all. I was to collect sea animal facts in order to survive, like a whale shark must follow its krill, and that’s the largest fish on Earth, not a whale at all,⁶ didn’t you know? This is all to say that at the Cologne Aquarium I was seeing all the most important things in the universe in the flesh for the first time. This had reduced me to a state of astoundment and clinical overstimulation, and it was in this context that my uncle led me to the innermost pavilion of the Aquarium at Cologne where I⁷ was brought before the California sea lion.

My task was to give the sea lion instructions. The aquarist showed me the symbols that he and the sea lion had developed. A flick of the wrist sent the animal off toward this or that hoop, a bouncing sign bade her to serve the beach ball into the crowd. Each time I gave a signal the California sea lion obeyed without hesitation, though it was not lost on me even at age five that each maneuver was followed with a reward of fish. I was even allowed to toss a fish to the sea lion at one point. At the end, the aquarist asked, “Do you want to tell her goodbye?” And he gave a signal to the California sea lion that caused her to look at me. I remember being struck by this, by that feeling of being perceived, being on some level understood by this creature for the first time. I started to wave, filled with wonder and gratitude, and I told her I’d see her again. Then, following some pre-arranged protocol of which only the sea lion and the aquarist had been aware, she bent her fat neck over the edge of the glass and kissed me on the mouth.

I stood stunned, secondhand saltwater dripping down my chin, feeling the imprint of whiskers recede. The crowd roared with laughter, joined reluctantly by my uncle. My eyes met the black unreadable void of the sea lion’s gaze for a moment, then she turned away and was given a fish.

How many others? That day, that week, that sea lion’s life? How many times had she leapt that hurdle, connected the syntactic content of the aquarist’s signal to an action, a gesture, a big sloppy wet one, and all for that trickle of fish? I understood, even at the time, why she did it, on a basic reward-level. ⁸ But how she felt about doing it was deeply mysterious. This was, I think, the first time I seriously considered animals in terms of their inner life. Did she think herself an actor, playing the role of some kiss-crazed demihuman monster? Did she assume that being kissed was something her bipedal captors appreciated, something we valued on the order of a couple sardines? Did she interpret it instead as one of her species’ mating displays, a gesture where love and aggression are indistinguishable? Or did she, on some weird pinniped level, simply find the whole thing distasteful, the lowest of the low stunts in this trick-based life? In hindsight, I find myself imagining that she found the whole exercise equally demeaning for the both of us. The average lifespan of the California sea lion is 21 years in captivity, according to my contact at the Aquarium at Cologne, so she is probably dead now. Or else extraordinarily old, resting out of sight in a stark white hospice tank, pecking softly at fishmeal and reflecting on life in this luxury prison, all these miniaturized lagoons and invisible cliffs, a life artificial, a life of the stage, of thunderous applause, of a thousand kisses ordered and performed upon the brittle waiting jaws of the bipeds. Was it all for sardines, when the sun goes down, or was there something more?

3. On Vermin. The famous first sentence of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis describes its protagonist having transformed into, in the original German, an Ungeziefer. This term, which typically appears as the final word of the sentence in English translations, has been rendered variously as “insect,” “cockroach,” and “bedbug,” though it is most literally translated as “vermin.” These translations betray the dark utility of the “vermin” concept—it does not denote any specific taxonomic group, nor any objective characteristic common to all vermin. Rather, the term represents a value judgment that the creature in question ought to be destroyed. Some definitions may require vermin to be insects (though the term more often refers to mammals in its American-English “varmint” form), or to spread disease (though even bedbugs are innocent of this), or to be in some way overpopulated (true perhaps of kangaroos, but not of livestock-hunting wolves, and both are varmints to some). But even with several of the aforementioned characteristics combined, the necessary conditions for verminhood do not obtain (e.g., house cats in the United States have infected thousands with incurable diseases, spawned uncontrolled feral populations, and inflicted spectacular impacts on native bird populations, but almost no one would describe a litter of kittens as “vermin”). The crux of the vermin descriptor, ultimately, is that its bearer, by fact of its own existence, represents some irredeemable affront to the well-being of Homo sapiens and, as such, is morally and ethically deserving of extermination. The only way to be vermin is if people decide you are vermin. Such designations constitute a power that people hold and can exercise for any of a multitude of reasons, or for no reason. This is why Kafka chose to write about Ungeziefer as opposed to Insekt, or the phonetically superior Kakerlake. The point of the sentence was not that Gregor Samsa now had compound eyes and a thorax. It was that he had become despicable, the target of subjective yet indisputable hatred, downgraded to the lowest sphere of God’s creation and left spiritually to crawl on the ground, continuing to exist solely by the inconceivable grace of his revilers.

Is the California sea lion vermin? This would seem a serious accusation, yet it lies at the core of the decision to allow the culling of individuals posing a threat to salmon. Preserving valuable fish stocks with a millenia-long history of importance to Native American Peoples and Nations should not be controversial, nor should acknowledging that current California sea lion numbers represent a spectacular conservation success far beyond what the most optimistic environmentalist in 1974 might have imagined. It stands to reason that when circumstances change, management systems should adjust along with them. What is awkward, morally and in terms of optics, is verminizing a species whose intelligence allows the formation of social groups,⁹ rudimentary communication with humans, and the capacity to execute covert operations for the United States government. Maybe our verminsayers should operate at finer scales, applying the label to individuals rather than species. Maybe “vermin” is less a binary distinction, with an animal’s level of verminity lying somewhere on a spectrum between cockroaches and snow leopards. Maybe we are better served by thinking up characteristics of animals who are not vermin, rather than coming at the issue from the opposite direction.

This is not to suggest any kind of “pro-vermin agenda.” Vermin are monstrous—you can ask anyone. A friend in São Paulo, just last week, narrowly recovered from a dengue fever he caught from a verminous mosquito. This was a horrible experience that could have killed him. I yearn for the day that our world is rid of all vermin, hell, I’ll take down a few of these vermin myself before it’s all through. However, we have to seriously reckon with the responsibility we hold in designating vermin. False envermination, especially if coupled with “removal,” could threaten to undermine the credibility of the whole system. We should be cautious not to seek out vermin where none are apparent, and resist all temptation to code verminlike notions onto species which may be merely challenging, lest we lose ourselves utterly to varmint paranoia, our bureaus crazed, our news cycles compromised, our legislatures disabled by the very concept of vermin, in a kind of “Brown Scare” wherein the true varmint was ourselves all along. One morning, Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He had visible ear flaps and three to five claws on his hind flippers…

4. Another Encounter. The man in the wetsuit is stalking the beach with a knife in his outstretched hand. Before him is a field of California sea lions, splayed across the sand. One of them in particular, a big male with sandy fur and scars behind his ear, lolls in the center, eyes black and anxious, mouth solemnly closed, with a discarded section of gillnet tight on his neck. The Pacific Ocean backdrops all this with an unconcerned rhythm of mid-size waves. The man in the wetsuit steps forward. Careful among the California sea lions, he draws twitches and muted barks, but the females in their repose grant him passage, such that an onlooker might assume they appreciate what the man in the wetsuit is there to do. He reaches the entangled male, the wind whipping wild through his curly blonde hair, and with his off-hand he makes a gesture of peace, showing that his palm is free of weaponry or secrets, laying it all bare, his opposable thumbs inert, directing this gesture at an animal with four fins. The male grows agitated—does he not understand? He shudders his great girth and barks as the man in the wetsuit slinks counterclockwise, still showing his hand to those big empty eyes, then grasping for the depression in the animal’s neck where the fishing net has dug a thin trench, blood oozing generously from under the monofilament. The man grabs hold, pulls, digs his knife in and cuts, severing one cord of the net. The sea lion roars and the man staggers back. A nearby female grunts and bares her teeth—this is all too close to the nursery—but surely she realizes what’s happening, understands the higher purpose at play. These are intelligent animals. The man in the wetsuit returns to the ensnared one. The second cord of gillnet comes off without incident, but the third and final cord, the one reopening the sea lion’s scar, remains taut. The man in the wetsuit must get his hands very close to the California sea lion’s head to free him finally from the net. Their eyes are locked on one another. The sea lion’s snorts come into time with the heaving chest of the man in the wetsuit. Finally, it seems, they have arrived somewhere together. Motions conducted repetitively, stimuli translated from one neuronal system across an ethereal codex of taxonomic orders into another, converted into syntactic content in the lost world of the otariid’s language center, and after a few moments what had instinctively registered as aggression is recontextualized as altruism, yes, we’re all friends and buddies here, and the man in the wetsuit can see the animal comprehends this, he’s worked with dozens of California sea lions, he recognizes the moment when the neural substrates of inhibitory control fire all at once, overriding the earlier battle reaction, and the whole situation diffuses, and learning, real learning occurs, as it might in a human being. The man reaches forward to cut the last of the netting off the sea lion. The California sea lion hurls around and bites the man who is attacking him in the throat.

5. On Harems. California sea lions follow a breeding pattern known as polygyny, wherein each male mates with multiple females, but each female mates with only a single male. At a glance, this sounds like a pretty good idea. After all, a male can produce viable allotments of sperm in rapid succession, whereas each female can muster but a single pregnancy at a time. It’s logical that if the females congregate around the most desirable males, such that these highest-value males share their excellent genes with the majority of the females, then the most desirable traits for the species as a whole will be well-represented in each new generation.

We’ve all heard the story: Each year, when the females go into heat, male California sea lions stake out territory along beaches, rocky coasts, intertidal flats, and other ideal pupping grounds. The strongest males joust over territory in a brutish, winner-takes-all contest to monopolize as many females as possible. When the carnage of sand and blood is settled and the lines are drawn, the strong territorial males sow their seed with the crowds of females gathered in their glory, while the weakest, battered males slither pathetically out to sea, to drown their sorrows in anchovies in the hopes that next year they’ll be big enough to mate, too. Meanwhile the children of the victors grow strong and vivacious in their nurseries, nursed by the dutiful conquered females, and thus the fittest survive, and the population’s long-term survival is all but assured.

It’s a nice story, one that no doubt appeals to those who believe physical prowess and task-adherence are the keys to the female heart. Interestingly, however, recent research has thrown a lot of cold water on this picturesque view of California sea lion harem life. It appears the situation is far more complicated than we previously expected.

The first clues came way back in the 1970s, when researchers noticed that California sea lion males did not appear to actively “monopolize” females or prevent them from leaving the harem, as one might expect them to in a brutish, polygynous system like this.¹⁰ Instead, they observed that most of the mate choice was in fact being done by the females. Females would form groups of ten or so individuals and cruise freely between the males’ territories. They took their time, occasionally mounting one another while they dithered over their selections. Sometimes they appeared to choose the most desired male as a group, while other times, individual females would break off from the group to join a harem she preferred. They seemed to avoid aggressive, noisy males, instead preferring those who slept lazily on the beach. This was all very perplexing, and suggested a somehow more complex dynamic than the winner-takes-all, male-driven system previously hypothesized.

In the 2000s and 2010s things came to a head, as researchers gained an understanding of female mobility and the role of non-territorial males. A number of careful, detailed studies published on sea lion reproductive behavior, some including direct genetic analysis, began to trace paternity and found that territorial males appeared to have fathered a fraction of the pups in their zones of control.¹¹ In fact, reproductive success is far less strongly associated with strong males defending a large territory than the image of polygynous harems might suggest. It now appears likely that non-territorial males, when banished from the glory of the rookeries, do not simply slink away to nurse their wounds on some forlorn beach. The females choose to mate with them, often,¹² in the open water between territories. And the powerful, war-weary males raise the progeny of these offshore affairs as their own, a welcome addition to the harem, no one the wiser.¹³

Most people, once acquainted with the concept, have spent a little time imagining themselves at the center of some sort of harem. Many of today’s harems, after all, are not inherently sexual. A beta critique for a draft novel is a kind of harem, and most communities on the website Twitch have a harem-like structure. It’s a nice feeling to be at the core of things, to be wanted in several directions at once. Of course, for most of us, these harem dreams are only dreams. I wonder if recent developments regarding California sea lions might open the door toward new types of harems. One imagines a culture war, a great national nightmare, a reckoning with new experimental social designs far more esoteric and sea lion-based than any of their historical predecessors. A total erosion of the American nuclear family draws close at hand, as harems are created and dissolved, harems swallowed by other harems, harems waging psychosexual war with rival harems in the streets, unfurling all sociocultural fabrics, driving the Electoral College into the sea, flinging open the door to completely mesopelagic concepts of rank and status, where brittle notions of gender and hierarchy break down, whether split by lines in the sand or cast carelessly offshore, and discrete units of personal freedom are exchanged like trading cards. That’s what a dirty little bitch I am, says your daughter to some non-territorial burnout on his way to becoming beachmaster of the local Jamba Juice. If you thought the youth of America were corrupted before, just wait.

6. Their Minds. The unpublished fantasy novel Death: An Oceanography by D.M. Fensir¹⁴ contains a passage where the protagonist discovers an ancient tome recounting the historical moment (in the fictional chronology of this secondary world) when sea lions were first understood to be intelligent:

THE SEAL-MEN, called BYRNA in the East, have been known to the Husar and the Polzak for but few short Years. In Truth, the Husar of Revanica hunted the Seal-Man for many Centuries, though it is now known that they have a Primitive Intelligence, and had instituted a Society in the under-water Caves of Quoralis. The Husar learned this on the Hunt—when ready to bring End to the Misery of his Prey, he found that the Seal had learned the Language of Man, as thus the Seal spake the Words: “I Beg of Thee – Don’t Murder Me!”

Stories like this reflect a broadly held belief about mammals, which is that they ought to, or do secretly, have humanlike intelligence, goals, dreams, and desires. We are fascinated by stories of octopus teachers, Samaritan dolphins, monkeys at typewriters. Are California sea lions intelligent? Do they live in a society? There is an enormous body of ongoing research on pinniped intelligence, and on marine mammal behavior more generally, which I will not attempt to review in detail. Suffice it to say that, in studies of their memory, associative abilities, use of syntax, and problem-solving, California sea lions have exceeded¹⁵ researchers’ expectations¹⁶ again¹⁷ and again.¹⁸ Per my reading, the number of studies in which California sea lions met the researcher’s performance benchmarks far outnumber those in which they failed.¹⁹ They appear to demonstrate a solid grasp of symbolic (i.e., signed) language, a rudimentary lexical competence when introduced to human words, and the ability to apply previously-gained knowledge to new situations—much to the chagrin of those who toil at designing safe passages for salmon to migrate downriver and back. They have features of distinct personalities at both the individual and group level,²⁰ along with diverse altruistic and competitive social systems in the context of hunting, reproduction, and pup-rearing.

In the 2010s, India banned captive dolphin shows on the grounds that dolphins are “nonhuman persons” who have “their own specific rights.” This is based on a perception of dolphins as possessing sentience—the capacity to experience subjective states of being. Sentience, however, is difficult to frame and even more difficult to research, as it relies on a testable framework for identifying consciousness, which yet eludes us.²¹ As far as anyone knows, consciousness could as easily turn out to be an emergent property of particularly complex brains as some universal feature of existence, common to humans and sea lions and even the bones of half-eaten salmon.²² Is the star of the one-o-clock sea lion show aware she is imprisoned, or is she merely a biological golem, a network of physical systems responding to stimuli without any lights on inside?

Jane Goodall said: “Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then by knowingly and deliberately inflicting suffering on that creature, we are guilty.” Sea lions certainly can suffer pain—we can crack open their nervous systems and check that one. Whether they subjectively experience this pain, though, is another matter, one we are clueless about given the nascent state of consciousness research. When I meet the gaze of a California sea lion I feel as though I’m looking at some sort of intelligent being, something like a “nonhuman person.” At the same time, the subjective experience of sea lion-ness is a complete and utter mystery. I can’t tell what they’re aware of. I have no idea what it’s like to think a sea lion thought. I don’t know if they know they are alive, or whether they should be in zoos, or whether it’s right to cull them when they threaten the sustainability of some of this continent’s most crucial ecosystems.²³ When it comes to these questions of consciousness and agency, when the separation between “creature” and “person” breaks down, I’m at a loss.

In the end, I come away from this as I was at age five, face wet with Zalophian spittle as I stare into blank, black eyes. I’m vexed, completely at the mercy of the wry whiskered smile of the California sea lion. I fear we have underestimated them at every turn. From their stunning population explosion throughout the previous three-quarters of a century, to their remarkable if single-minded intelligence, to their nuanced social structure and seeming ability to capitalize on everything we throw at them, we for some reason continue to allow ourselves to be surprised by these things, treating them as curiosities or circus attractions or simply as part of the scenery. Look at that big ole blob, laying there on the beach, not getting any work done, what can you say about him. Only he’s not—he’s also a few yards offshore and everywhere along the coast, flitting through kelp stalks, coaxing a courtship routine out of the choosiest ladies in the kingdom, committing symbols to syntax, communicating underwater, staying at sea sometimes for weeks at a time… Or he’s farther up the inlet, slotting himself along the jetties and inlets of human society, and thriving there, doing what he has always sought to do, which is to eat an incredible amount of fish and gather in rookeries each mating season, gathering as we speak on islands and seacaves across the West Coast, staking out territories, building nurseries for the young ones out of dried kelp and the washed-up shavings of plastic trash can lids, while from our beachtowels and barstools and the passenger seats of our cars we hardly hear him bark and holler, watch him laze and then look away, yeah you see them all the time these days, I don’t know what it is to tell you the truth. In a lab in Seattle, salmonid biologists pore nervously over datasheets. On a beach in La Jolla a man’s trachea is half-crushed, and the ambulance is on its way, and there’s a toxin in the water that makes them more aggressive, hadn’t he heard? In a harem in Friedrichshain the landlord’s bombing for bedbugs again. In Cologne, who’s to say? In Old Sacramento, the sea lion is still on the Joe’s Crab Shack Beer Boat. She might stay there forever.

1. The other two are humans and bottlenose dolphins.
2. This is another species with a much greater presence off the West Coast than most seem to realize.
3. Not to mention a striking resemblance to our best friends, Canis familiaris.
4. Each California sea lion must consume nearly one-tenth of its body weight, as much as fifty pounds of fresh fish, every day.
5. To make matters worse, these particular salmon are also an important food source for the critically endangered Southern Resident population of killer whales—another marine mammal occupying a tenuous place in the human conception, being both an innocent victim of man-made environmental devastation and a brutish, remorseless killer in its own right.
6. In Vietnam, which has a significant whale shark population off its coast, the species is referred to as cá ông, which translates literally as “Sir Fish.”
7. I can’t say why I, specifically, was called down from the bleachers into the splash zone to stand below the edge of the tank. Maybe my exuberance caused me to stand out, or maybe my uncle had pulled some strings behind the scenes, slipped a twenty under the wrist zipper of the aquarist’s wetsuit… in any event it made perfect sense at the time that it would be me attending the sea lion, as I was after all imbued with a divine quest to become educated on such matters.
8. As my uncle explained it: “You do the trick, you get the fish, yum-yum. Fisch, yum-yum, exactly.”
9. Something similar could probably be said of wolves, who are varmint at times and the unofficial state mammal of Minnesota at others.
10. See: Odell DK (1975). Breeding biology of the California sea lion. Rapports et Proces-Verbaux des Réunions Conseil International pour l’Exploration de la Mer 169: 374–378.
11. See: Flatz R, et al. (2012) Weak polygyny in California sea lions and the potential for alternative mating tactics. PLoS ONE 7(4): 10.1371. Link.
12. Polygyny occurs when the benefits of desirable mate selection outweigh the costs of reduced genetic diversity which occur when the ratio of breeding females to breeding males is high. That is, while polygyny is advantageous to males through increased propagation of desirable genes, it is disadvantageous to females because it lowers the amount of phenotypic variation they have to choose from when selecting a mate. In situations when there is no strong bias towards one factor or the other, “weak polygyny” may occur, with females tending to congregate around territorial males, but also free to select unrelated, non-territorial males as they see fit. A growing body of research suggests that traditional, textbook models of polygyny may be undermined by female mobility and the breeding activity of non-territorial males. See: Nichols HJ, et al. (2022). Where are the beachmasters? Unexpectedly weak polygyny among southern elephant seals on a South Shetland Island. Journal of Zoology 316(2), 104-117. Link.
13. As an aside, research into a closely related species has suggested that even territorial sea lions do not derive their fitness from aggression or fighting ability, but rather, that females are selecting for large males because of their ability to go long periods without hunting (with associated benefits for parental care). See: Pörschmann U, et al. (2010) Male reproductive success and its behavioural correlates in a polygynous mammal, the Galápagos sea lion (Zalophus wollebaeki). Molecular Ecology, 19: 2574-2586. Link. As an aside to this aside, while evidence suggests female sea lions avoid aggressive males (see: Gerber LR, et al. (2010) The Cost of Male Aggression and Polygyny in California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus). PLoS ONE 5(8): e12230. Link.), and notwithstanding the weakening effect of non-territorial males on the polygynous social structure, it should be noted that territoriality is still the winning reproductive strategy for individual males, on average.
14. Referenced with permission from the author.
15. See: Genty E & Jean-Jacques Roeder (2006). Self-control: why should sea lions, Zalophus californianus, perform better than primates? Animal Behaviour 72, 1241-1247. Link.
16. See: Schusterman RJ and Kathy Krieger (1986). Artificial language comprehension and size transposition by a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, Vol. 100(4), 348-355. Link.
17. See: Schusterman RJ et al. The Cognitive Sea Lion: Meaning and Memory in the Laboratory and in Nature (2002). The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, Ed. Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt. Chapter 28. Link.
18. See: Schusterman RJ and David Kastak (1993). A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) is capable of forming equivalence relations. The Psychological Record (43), 828-839. Link.
19. This may, in part, be due to the general bias against null results in scientific publications. Another time, another note…
20. Also observed in Steller’s sea lions. See: de Vere AJ et al. (2017). Do pinnipeds have personality? Broad dimensions and contextual consistency of behavior in harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and California sea lions (Zalophus californianus). International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 30(0). Link.
21. For an interesting review of modern consciousness research, consult the book Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff, or the somewhat more antagonistic treatment in The Case Against Reality by Donald D. Hoffman.
22. I’d like to further explore the necessary conditions for a species evolving complex intelligence, but this whole thing has already gone on too long.
23. I have glossed over the salmon side of things in these notes, because I wanted to write about sea lions and took up too much space goofing around. The importance of salmonid stocks in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere really can’t be overstated and is crucial to understanding the stakes here. One interesting alternative to state-supervised culls is for Native Nations in the Columbia River Basin to reinstitute traditional sea lion hunts focused on key salmon run locations. I should probably profess some sort of opinion about all this, I know. It was my hope that I could provide enough background in these notes for the reader to draw her own conclusions about what ought to be done regarding the California sea lion. But this is disingenuous, as I’ve failed to come up with any conclusions of my own. I’ve spent a huge portion of my life (though perhaps not so much more than the average person) trying to sort out the situation with all these animals. At this point, I am resolved that no meaningful progress can be made until the science of consciousness is raised out of its infancy and allowed to flourish. Only once we can truly understand Mind can we grasp the full gravity of our dealings with other minds than our own. So I’ve been thinking lately.