San Diego Reader: By Caitlin Rother, Jan. 15, 2014
About a year ago at the La Jolla Cove, longtime marathon swimmer Claudia Rose was making her way toward La Jolla Shores with a friend when a group of sea lions charged at them. Startled into a fight-or-flight reaction, the swimmers veered to the south, toward the caves, to get away from the pinnipeds. Rose’s friend panicked, cramped up, and couldn’t swim very well, but his wetsuit kept him buoyant until he could recover.
Rose was shaken by the confrontation but was even more unnerved a couple of months later, when a sea lion attacked her injured, bandaged hand.
“I had tape on my finger. He ripped off the tape and he broke or sprained my finger really badly,” said Rose, 49, a systems engineer who has been swimming at the Cove for nearly two decades. “We haven’t had that kind of touching behavior before.”
Reflecting a population explosion of sea lions along the California coast, the colony “hauling out” on the rocks and swimming around the waters of the Cove has grown logarithmically in the past decade.
The small number of sea lions that swimmers used to enjoy watching frolic some years ago has turned into a colony of as many as 300, ranging in size from 100-pound females to 900-pound bulls, which have been mounting, biting, charging, and baring their teeth at swimmers and beachgoers.
“The baring the teeth thing — they’re very aggressive, so again, people have to remember they are wild animals,” said Monica DeAngelis, a marine mammal biologist with the National Marine Fishery Service’s West Coast regional office, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It’s hard to predict or know what they might be thinking.”
Lately, the increasingly territorial animals have started blocking swimmers from getting into the water, forcing people to walk back and forth on the beach until they can find a safe opening to enter the ocean. One even went so far as to bite a swimmer wearing a wetsuit at the water’s edge. Read more..