January 8, 2026 — Of all the schemes that humans have devised to keep sea lions from gorging on the salmon of the Columbia River basin, none has worked for long. Local officials and researchers have chased sea lions with boats and peppered them with rubber bullets; they’ve detonated noisy explosives. They’ve outfitted the docks where the animals like to rest with uncomfortable spinners, electrified mats, flailing tube men, and motion-activated sprinklers. (“Very surprisingly, they don’t like to get wet on land,” Casey Clark, a marine-mammal biologist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told me.) At one point, the Port of Astoria dispatched a 32-foot fiberglass replica of sea lions’ primary predator, the orca, outfitted with real orca sounds, that almost immediately capsized. Scientists have captured sea lions and released them thousands of miles away, as far as Southern California. No matter the tactic, the result is largely the same: Within weeks, or sometimes even hours, the sea lions swim right back.
The Giant, Voracious Sea Lions That Humans Cannot Stop
Katherine J. Wu,