Wayward sea lion is a Steller, biologists confirm

Biologists have determined a strange-looking sea lion recently spotted by a tour boat captain at the entrance to Newport Harbor belongs to a species more at home in the Gulf of Alaska or off the coast of Oregon.

“It’s definitely a Steller sea lion,” said Joe Cordaro, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “It’s probably an animal who has wandered way, way out of its range.”

Whether Newport’s visitor from the north set a new record for the southernmost sighting could not immediately be verified Friday.

Eric Stallcup, a local tour boat captain, snapped numerous photographs of the animal last week after he realized it looked suspiciously different from the other sea lions in the area. The photographs were examined by biologists at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla.

Stellers typically live in an area between the Kuril Islands and the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia to the Gulf of Alaska in the north, stretching down to Año Nuevo Island off the central coast of California.

“One of the things they would like to figure out is if this a trend or if it is an isolated incident,” said Dennis Kelly, professor of marine science at OCC.

If Steller sea lions start migrating as far south as Newport, they could end up bullying California sea lions out of the area, which are much smaller than the larger, northern species, Kelly said.

— Brianna Bailey