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Salmon in the Pacific Northwest Are Facing a New Threat: Booming Populations of Seals and Sea Lions
The mammals’ return to the region represented a conservation success story, but their appetite for endangered fish is upsetting the balance of a delicate ecosystem
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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.
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“Watersheds are out of balance, and pinniped predation on salmon is a symptom of that,” says Cecilia Gobin, a conservation policy analyst with the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, a consortium of 20 fishing tribes in western Washington. As the fish return to spawn in the rivers and streams where they were hatched, bottlenecks like dams stir up pinniped feeding frenzies. The outlook is especially dire for Chinook, the largest of the Pacific salmon, also known as king salmon. Chinook are the centerpiece of the state’s billion-dollar fishing industry (Washington allows both commercial and recreational salmon fishing), with regulations on quantity and size. Salmon are also a critical food source for many species of wildlife, including Washington’s beloved and critically endangered Southern Resident killer whales.
For Native Americans who have fished these waters for millennia, salmon are the backbone of their diet and culture. Salmon-related activities shape the vocabulary of tribal languages and drive the yearly calendar. The cycle begins with the return of the first salmon in spring, which Pacific Northwest tribal nations honor with the First Salmon feast. Gobin, a Tulalip tribal member, says her people believe that the first fish is a “scout” for the rest of the salmon community, “to see how well we’ve been taking care of this place, of the waters.” The tribe honors this fish during the ceremonial dinner. “We eat the First Salmon with the community, and then we return his remains back to the water, so that he can go back to his villages and report what he saw.” If the salmon population collapses, she adds, “everything stands to be lost. You’re losing resources that are tied to the language and language that’s tied to the land.”
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This article is a selection from the June 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
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The salmon’s demise also threatens tribes’ treaty fishing rights, says Peggen Frank, executive director of the advocacy group Salmon Defense. Frank’s father-in-law, Billy Frank Jr., was a Nisqually fisherman and leader of the “fish wars” that culminated in the 1970s with Washington tribes gaining the right to catch as many as half the salmon in their traditional territories. Frank recalls when her husband, Willie Frank III, also a fisherman, would come back with many totes full of salmon. “Now,” she says, “they barely even get one.” She fears that salmon will disappear during her lifetime unless the pinniped population is controlled. “How it gets done,” she says, “that will be interesting.”
Efforts to keep pinnipeds away from salmon have been underway for years, with little success. Loud noises, for instance—from firecrackers to high-pitched underwater pulses—damaged some animals’ hearing. And sea lions that were captured and released hundreds of miles away usually just swam right back. “We’re fighting an uphill battle,” says Casey Clark, lead marine mammal researcher for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, “because once an animal has figured out that there’s a really good food source somewhere, it’s incredible what it takes to get them to stop.”
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In the Columbia River Basin, sea lions have scarfed down so many salmon that habitual offenders face “lethal removal.” This exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act targets sea lions that continually hang around and gorge themselves near the fish ladders designed to help salmon make their way around dams and other obstacles. A longstanding limited cull was expanded in 2020 to measure the benefits to salmon. Since then, 199 sea lions have been killed, sparing as many as 61,000 salmon, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. So far, the program has had promising results, with fewer sea lions lurking near the fish ladders and the outlook for Chinook improving. The permit, which expires this August, will likely be extended.
The concept of killing pinnipeds to save fish draws fire from animal-rights advocates and raises concerns about the broader environmental impacts. “You’re going to wind up with issues,” says Casey Mclean, executive director of SR3, which operates a nonprofit marine animal hospital in the Seattle area. “The ecosystem is a web, and if you pull on one string, we’re not going to know what that’s going to cause.”
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That’s why Sevigny and Summers are out on their boogie boards scooping up seal poop. “Managing an endangered species that is preyed on by another endangered species is a complex thing,” Sevigny says. The biologists are working with state Fish and Wildlife scientists, one of several collaborations between Puget Sound tribes and other agencies studying ways to bolster salmon while keeping both populations healthy. While feasting sea lions can have a visible toll on salmon, less is known about the dining habits of seals. Fish bones in the scat will reveal how much and what type of salmon seals in the area are eating, along with genetic material showing the salmon consumed by individual seals. Preliminary results for the Port Susan Bay area suggest that seals aren’t having a major impact, according to Sevigny. While other river systems may have different scenarios, “it seems like salmon are not a really big part of our seal diet,” she explains.
The Stillaguamish are working on habitat restoration, rewilding former farmlands into cool, shady pools where young salmon can grow and strengthen before their arduous journey to the sea. Scientists from the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe are also working with the nonprofit conservation research organization Oceans Initiative and the advocacy group Long Live the Kings, as well as state agencies, to test a promising new deterrent. The device startles seals hanging around salmon run obstacles and drives them away from the buffet. The underwater system, which emits short, random bursts that sound like nails on a chalkboard, is much quieter than old-school noisemakers and doesn’t harm animals’ hearing. But it distracts seals, buying fish “just enough time to get through the ladder,” says Rob Williams, a scientist with Oceans Initiative. In trials so far, Williams says, the device cuts salmon predation by up to 80 percent.
For the Salmon People, as the Pacific Northwest nations call themselves, the need to give fish a fighting chance is urgent. “We only have a short window of time to recover salmon,” Frank says. “If we miss that chance, then we will be the generation that let the salmon go.”