What California’s dying sea lions have to do with Tuesday’s election

What California’s Dying Sea Lions Have to Do with Tuesday’s Election

When a Marin County resident called the Marine Mammal Center about a sick sea lion, staff had already taken 500 calls that day. Marine mammals have been dying along California’s coast since last year, and the cause is the ocean itself. Warming water and vanishing ice have crashed the small prey that sea lions and gray whales depend on, and starvation is spreading. Now a persistent marine heat wave off the central and southern coast is being compounded by a historic El Niño. Sea lions can’t vote for the ocean, but we can, and the candidates who treat climate change as a real threat will decide how many more wash ashore.