Monday May 19, 2025
Smithsonian —
On a cold night along the coast of Washington State, two women on boogie boards paddle furiously across surging waters. Clad in survival suits and headlamps, Jennifer Sevigny and Amanda Summers are heading back from a harbor seal gathering in Port Susan Bay with dry bags full of seal scat. The pair are biologists, employed by the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians, and they’re mining the smelly, oily stuff for solutions to a wrenching conflict between some of the region’s most cherished marine creatures.
The flotillas of seals and sea lions plying Puget Sound today are a conservation success story. Because of their competition with fishermen, these animals were the target of state-sponsored bounty hunter programs in Alaska, Washington and Oregon. By 1960, the region’s pinniped numbers had been dramatically reduced. With the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, hunting them became illegal, and their numbers rebounded. But the salmon populations on which they prey plummeted.
The causes of the salmon crisis include habitat lost to urban development and migration routes blocked by dams and roads. As cities have pumped water out of rivers, they’ve also reduced the amount of water in the streams. The shallow water is warmer, and salmon need colder temperatures to spawn and rear young. Climate change is also warming waters and altering weather patterns, disturbing both the freshwater and ocean stages of the salmon life cycle. With the Pacific Northwest’s once-teeming salmon runs now just a thin trickle, the growing numbers of hungry pinnipeds have an outsize impact.