![\"Aerial](\"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/aerial-locks-herschel-sea-lion.jpg\")
<\/a>The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks connect Puget Sound with Lake Washington in Washington State. Photo by Danita Delimont\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n
A few California sea lions began to creep back into northern Puget Sound soon after, migrating north from the Channel Islands. Their population increased about five percent per year. In the 1980s, Herschel was the first to venture all the way to the locks. Initially, people were excited to see the hulking visitor. He seemed so innocent at first. As the story goes, an old fisherman spotted him, saw the long whiskers, and called out (in what I imagine was a typical Scandinavian accent, as most Seattle-area fishermen hail from Sweden or Norway), \u201cOh hey, that looks like old Herschel that I used to work with down at the docks.\u201d The name stuck and for most people became the generic term for any sea lion around Seattle.<\/p>\n
Herschel positioned himself at the ocean-side entrance to the locks where he\u2019d found a bountiful swim-through fast food joint and proceeded to gorge on fish. Soon, other young males that hadn\u2019t yet established harems caught on and journeyed up from California with Herschel to join in the annual feast.<\/p>\n
Steelhead is the same species as rainbow trout, but with salmon-like tendencies\u2014 historically they\u2019ve often been considered a salmon. While rainbow trout dwell solely in fresh water, steelhead migrate to and from the ocean like chinook, coho, chum, pink, and sockeye salmon. Yet unlike most salmon, steelhead can live to spawn more than once. Herschel and his pals would show up just as the steelhead began fighting their way through the locks in mid-November and would stay through March.<\/p>\n
A picture at the locks\u2019 visitor center from 1985 shows a glossy, fat sea lion labeled Herschel. His mouth is agape while he swallows an equally pinguid steelhead. At nearly half a tonne, he looks like he doesn\u2019t care what you think about him. He looks like the Notorious B.I.G., ready to take on the west coast, gobbling through fish like a rapper blows through money. A newspaper account from 1985 says Herschel could kill 13 fish in an hour and 20 minutes\u2014that\u2019s about a fish every six minutes. When he was full, Herschel would rip the eggs out of the females, leaving the rest to float away. Skip the nigiri, straight to the roe.<\/p>\n
<\/a>In Seattle, Herschel\u2019s gluttony became the stuff of legends. Detail of a photo by Grant Haller, Post-Intelligencer<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n By then, wildlife managers had begun to panic about the sea lions\u2019 impact. \u201cA fat, sassy California sea lion nicknamed Herschel is being blamed for the devastation of an entire run of steelhead trout, one of the most popular game fish in the Pacific Northwest,\u201d the LA Times<\/em> declared in 1985. The MMPA prohibited killing the pinnipeds, but wildlife managers began working through every non-lethal deterrent they could imagine.<\/p>\n They tried firing off underwater firecrackers (also known as seal bombs), which send out painful blast waves that can be felt for kilometers underwater. The sea lions fled, but returned as soon as the explosions stopped, and eventually they learned to avoid getting hit by swimming erratically. (The bombs also harm other marine life like whales and dolphins.) Workers installed an underwater speaker system to blare high-pitched pinging sounds to annoy the animals, but Herschel and his gang habituated to it.<\/p>\n An audio track of squeaks and chirps from killer whales, which prey on sea lions, didn\u2019t work either, nor did a life-size fiberglass killer whale called Fake Willy that floated in the water column. The wildlife managers next tried feeding the animals steelhead stuffed full of lithium chloride, a chemical that makes sea lions vomit but won\u2019t kill them. They quickly learned to associate humans in yellow suits with bad-tasting fish and avoided the people altogether. A barrier net strung up at the base of the locks just shifted the buffet a bit farther out to sea. Later, they tried shooting the animals with rubber-tipped arrows to no avail.<\/p>\n \u201cSea lions are very, very smart. Like, as smart as the smartest dog you know,\u201d says Selina Heppell, who heads the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University and helped create the killer whale recording to scare Herschel when she was a high school student. \u201cThey habituate to about any behavioral deterrent.\u201d<\/p>\n The sea lions kept on coming and kept on eating. In 1986, the Seattle Times<\/em> trumpeted, \u201cIt\u2019s the return of \u2018Herschel\u2019 and the good old boys\u2014those wandering California sea lions that are arriving earlier, staying later, and dining out more frequently. Pass the salmon and steelhead, please.\u201d In 1982, 2,575 steelhead, Washington\u2019s state fish, had swum through the locks; in the fall of 1988, only 686 were counted.<\/p>\n Fake Willy, one of the failed California sea lion deterrents employed at Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, went missing for years before turning up outside a Mexican restaurant in Seattle. Locks staff asked for Fake Willy\u2019s return, and now the sculpture stands in front of the visitor center during summer months. The rest of the year, it\u2019s stored on this platform. Photo by Katharine Gammon<\/p><\/div>\n Public opinion had turned against Herschel and his posse by the time Brent Norberg became responsible for their management in 1989 as the marine mammal coordinator for the northwest region of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The seasonal Puget Sound California sea lion population had swelled in the preceding decade, fluctuating between 300 and more than 1,000\u2014and people were demanding action. \u201cAt the time, there was a big push to try and eradicate sea lions in Puget Sound because there was a general feeling that all<\/em> the animals in the sound were involved [in overexploiting steelhead at the locks],\u201d says Norberg, who retired in 2016. \u201cBut that wasn\u2019t so.\u201d<\/p>\n While all sea lions at the locks were known as Herschel in the media initially, Norberg and his NOAA colleagues assigned numbers and used physical characteristics to identify the animals that were causing trouble. Humpback had a signature hump. Fang had a broken tooth. And Blue Eye? He was blind. Herschel was the biggest, estimated between 300 and 400 kilograms. Next, they used traps to capture the animals and tag them or place a large numbered brand in the middle of their backs. By identifying individuals, the scientists were able to prove that only a fraction\u2014perhaps as few as three percent\u2014of the sea lions in Puget Sound were wolfing down steelhead at the locks. The rest were likely eating steelhead elsewhere in the area\u2014just not as voraciously.<\/p>\n Before Norberg\u2019s research, desperate wildlife managers had captured 39 sea lions from Shilshole Bay (just outside the ship canal leading to the locks) and dropped them off along the outer coast of Washington State in 1988; 29 of the animals returned within two weeks (the quickest swam back in just four days). The following year, trucks carried six sea lions down to Southern California. They returned in a month. Wildlife managers were running out of options.<\/p>\n Herschel began to take on a mythical status. Many people still believe that the sea lion and his posse beat the truck returning from California, says Jay Wells, former visitor center manager at the locks\u2014though whether Herschel was actually one of the animals trucked away is unclear. \u201cIt\u2019s just one of the stories that develop as the mythology deepens,\u201d says Wells. \u201cThere\u2019s no way the animal returned that quickly unless he was swimming at 80 miles per hour [129 kilometers per hour].\u201d Sea lions\u00a0can swim in burst\u00a0speeds\u00a0up to 40 kilometers per hour, but generally cruise at around 17 kilometers per hour.<\/p>\n The steelhead continued to spiral. By 1992, the run had dwindled to 184 fish. The all-you-can-eat buffet had become a bust, and only a few sea lions showed up that fall. Herschel was a no-show. Maybe, husky and hale, he had found a harem out in the Pacific. Maybe he died somewhere. Maybe some concerned citizen put a target on his back (whisperings about sea lion assassination persist).<\/p>\n While many Seattleites cursed the sea lions, others rooted for the remaining animals. Animal rights activists tried to stop wildlife managers from tracking and harassing the sea lions. After one activist climbed onto a trap and handcuffed himself to the bars, police cut him loose, took him to the station, and then released him, much like the sea lions.<\/p>\n Assistant lockmaster Scott Diehl, who has worked at the locks for decades, points out there was no winning: if they didn\u2019t do anything about the problem, the fish were gone. If they tried to take action, activists balked. Says Diehl: \u201cWe were getting death threats.\u201d<\/p>\n These days, visitors may see salmon passing the viewing window at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, though they\u2019re not likely to spot a single steelhead. Photo by Danita Delimont\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n There was a time when a visitor to the locks could descend the cement steps to the viewing room and press against the thick Plexiglas to see the silvery bodies of steelhead struggle up the entrance to the fish ladder. The fish were once so thick they looked like a silver hurricane. Now, that run is completely gone. The designated fish counters saw an average of four steelhead enter the Cedar River for spawning each year between 2010 and 2014, and not a single one since. And not a single steelhead has been spotted entering Lake Washington since 2009.<\/p>\n It\u2019s undeniable that sea lions impacted the steelhead population by capitalizing on the advantage afforded by the locks. Wildlife managers estimate the animals consumed between 42 and 65 percent of the total steelhead run between 1986 and 1992. Yet steelhead had been in decline in parts of Puget Sound long before Herschel boldly poked his whiskered snout up to the foreign structure and discovered nirvana. Models suggest that the historical steelhead run in Puget Sound maxed out somewhere between 409,000 and 930,000 fish. The fishery likely peaked in 1895 with 204,600 steelhead caught, but such a heavy harvest was unsustainable. Just three years later, the Washington State Fish Commission estimated that the run had dropped by half.<\/p>\n When predatory animals go from being a rarity to a commonplace, people struggle to adjust\u2014and it\u2019s especially hard if we watch them compete for depleting resources. Sea lions often consume their meals on the surface, which is unfortunate for their public image. \u201cWe tend to want to blame things on the surface, but would anyone think to start blaming hake, pollock, sculpins?\u201d says Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit in the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. Those are all species that may be feeding on juvenile fish. \u201cWe tend to come up with simple narratives: when salmon are down, it must be the fault of something we see.\u201d<\/p>\n Sea lions share their scapegoat status with numerous other fish eaters. In Atlantic Canada, cod stocks have barely begun to rebound from collapse in the 1990s despite a fishing moratorium\u2014and the fishing community blames cod-hungry gray seals. The Canadian government responded in 2012 with a bounty system designed to wipe 70,000 gray seals out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, though a 2011 study by Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologists found that seals have been framed: the slow recovery is more likely linked to a shortage of capelin, the cod\u2019s primary food.<\/p>\n Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n Killer whales, too, have been in the crosshairs. In the early 1960s, the Canadian fisheries department mounted a .50-caliber machine gun along Seymour Narrows north of Campbell River, British Columbia, with the intent of shooting whales to save more salmon for anglers. No shots were ever fired, says Trites. But that wasn\u2019t due to human restraint: as the story goes, it was because no whales happened to come by that summer, and the plan was aborted.<\/p>\n The role whales play in declining fish stocks has also been used as justification for countries such as Iceland, Norway, and Japan to continue hunting whales. This year, Norway announced it would raise its quota of whales to 1,278 from 999, despite an international moratorium on the practice.<\/p>\n Cormorants, river otters, mink, and salmon sharks are a few of the other animals that have been scapegoats. And, more recently, seals have been labeled villains in the case of the disappearing chinook salmon in British Columbia, with some people demanding a cull<\/a> while overlooking the myriad other factors in the decline\u2014warming waters, pollution, and fishing pressures, for example.<\/p>\n After a frustrating decade spent harassing the sea lions at the locks, wildlife managers returned to discussions about lethal tactics. The MMPA did have a provision to allow nuisance animals to be killed, but only when the entire species up and down the US west coast had reached its optimum sustainable population\u2014which for sea lions was around 250,000 and hadn\u2019t happened at the time.<\/p>\n In 1994, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife wrote an amendment that allowed \u201clethal taking of individually identifiable pinnipeds which are having a significant negative impact on the decline or recovery of salmonid fishery stocks.\u201d Unlike most laws pertaining to wildlife culls, this language is oddly specific, targeting the Herschels of the world.<\/p>\n At a whopping 660 kilograms, Hugh (short for humongous) is the largest California sea lion recorded. He was captured in 2008 at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, between Washington and Oregon, another area vulnerable to sea lion predation. \u201cHe was the first recorded hybrid cross between a California sea lion and the Goodyear blimp,\u201d jokes Steve Jeffries of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Photo courtesy of Steve Jeffries\/Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife<\/p><\/div>\n There were still hurdles. The state had to apply for authorization from the federal government, which it quickly did for the three biggest remaining offenders at the locks: Hondo, Big Frank, and Bob.<\/p>\n The feds formed a task force of 21 members to consider the request. A third of the task force argued against lethal removal, saying the sea lions were being unfairly targeted. They reasoned that there was too much emphasis on sea lion predation and not enough on other factors affecting steelhead throughout their life cycle\u2014factors like \u201cpoor fisheries management, habitat degradation, and poor lock construction and operation.\u201d Yet those complex problems were more challenging to address and intertwined with regional economics, so the dissenters were overruled, and the amendment passed.<\/p>\n By then, only a few stubborn sea lions still frequented the locks\u2014the steelhead population was down to 70 fish. Still, Hondo was captured in January 1995 and held for the duration of the steelhead run to test the effect of removing a predator from the system. (Hondo was accused of eating 60 percent of the steelhead run by himself, plus the managers were unable to capture the other rogue pinnipeds.) While he was confined in a sea pen, the steelhead making it through the locks increased from 70 to 126.<\/p>\n The small experiment showed the task force that removing sea lions could benefit steelhead. But despite the grant of lethal authority, the sea lions were never killed because of pressure from activists and clemency granted by then-Vice President Al Gore. Instead, the last three were trapped and exiled via FedEx to Sea World in Orlando, Florida, in May 1996.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>The Accused<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Hondo Goes to the Big House<\/h2>\n
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