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.
Congress tackles growing sea lion population in Columbia River
December 8, 2025 — The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources took on the Columbia River’s salmon-eating sea lion problem in a nearly 2½-hour hearing Wednesday.
After establishing the scale of the sea lion population explosion around the Pacific Northwest, the meeting looked at the effectiveness of legislative efforts to address the problem — mostly centering around killing them.
The killings had largely faded from controversy as other proposed solutions to salmon extinction have floundered, leaving sea lions as an obvious target. That culminated earlier this year when the federal permit that allows Northwest states and some Native nations to trap and kill sea lions in the Columbia River was reapproved without almost any opposition.
The reapproved permit allowed hundreds of sea lions that weren’t killed under a 2020 approval to be killed by 2030. During the hearing, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, questioned why more of the 716 that were initially approved to be killed had not been.
Sea lions keep gorging on endangered salmon despite 2018 law
December 4, 2025 — Efforts to stop Pacific sea lions from feasting on endangered salmon and steelhead have largely failed despite millions of taxpayer dollars spent on those efforts, lawmakers were told Wednesday.
In a hearing on the efficacy of the Endangered Salmon Predation Prevention Act adopted in 2018, witnesses told members of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries that wildlife managers have been unable to check a sustained population boom of the salmon-devouring pinnipeds — marine mammals with both front and rear flippers — that began in the 1990s.
“These animals are remarkably resilient, and they do know where their food source is,” Sam Rauch, deputy assistant administrator for NOAA Fisheries, told the subcommittee. “It is very difficult to encourage them to leave with anything less than force,” which usually means trap and kill.