The Sad Reality Of Starving, Dying Sea Lions On Venice… [A breeze] catches the scent of dead, rotting sea lion. The pungent stench lingers… It’s hard to ignore… The dead pups are small enough to be tied up tight in black plastic garbage bags. The larger adult sea lions lay out in the open.

Nick Fash, Heal the Bay: "It’s quite frightening… they wash up on our beaches weak and sickened and many cases dying, which is what you see in the bags.”

National Geographic, Jun 5, 2015: Number of Starving Sea Lions in California ‘Unprecedented’… raising questions about what the future holds after three years of mass strandings — More than 3,000 starving sea lion pups have washed up… And those are the lucky pups. The situation on California’s Channel Islands, where more than 90 percent of the U.S. sea lion population congregates to breed and nurse young, is even worse… "The few pups that have enough strength to leave the rookeries and make it to the mainland get recorded as strandings,” says NOAA’s Mark Lowry… "There’s a lot of death out there.”… When Lowry visited two of the main U.S. sea lion nurseries in April, he found a grim scene. In addition to beaches full of starving or dead pups, there were dead adult female sea lions and many aborted fetuses. "Adult females are taking a hit now,” he says. "What I’m predicting is that pup production—when they start being born in June—is going to be really low.”… This year, the most likely culprit is that warm water blob… But that blob wasn’t there during the earlier strandings, when oceanographic conditions looked much more normal. It’s also uncertain whether prey populations have died out… Sea lions are considered sentinel species, which means they’re used as indicators of ocean health—and the indications aren’t looking good.