Harger: I love sea lions. Some of them have to die, or $7 billion in salmon recovery goes in their adorable bellies
Jul 22, 2026, 7:41 AM | Updated: 2:11 pm
I love sea lions. I want that on the record before we go any further, because by the end of this you’re going to wonder.
They bark like drunk uncles. They lounge on docks like they’re paying moorage. They’re smart, they’re social, and they belong here.
They’re also part of an ecosystem, and in a few specific places that system has quit working.
We’ve spent decades trying everything else. Firecrackers. Rubber buckshot. Hazing boats. And Washington is spending billions under federal court order on a salmon recovery program that a growing pile of evidence says gets undone at the last checkpoint. What’s at that checkpoint? Sea lions.
I’ve put this off for years. I hate saying it. But some sea lions gotta die.
A U.S. House subcommittee took testimony Tuesday on a bill letting Washington and the treaty tribes do exactly that, at specific places, under hard caps. It’s sponsored by Michael Baumgartner, a conservative Republican from Spokane, and Emily Randall, a progressive Democrat from the Olympic Peninsula. Those two agree on almost nothing. Neither do the groups behind them.
Meanwhile, the southern resident orcas are starving for the Chinook that never make it home. And we’ve had this exact fight once before in this state. It ended badly for the fish.
Washington spends $1 million a day on culverts under a federal court order
A federal judge ordered Washington in 2013 to replace more than 800 salmon-blocking culverts, with a deadline of 2030. The state fought it to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost on a 4-4 split.
Early estimates put the tab around $2 billion. The Washington State Department of Transportation has spent or committed close to $4 billion and asked the Legislature for another $3.5 billion to $4 billion. The current forecast to finish runs $7.3 billion to $7.8 billion. Washington is spending about $1 million a day on culverts — every day.
It gets worse. A Seattle Times investigation found that for every barrier the state removes, nine more upstream and two more downstream still block fish. Some $100 million projects are essentially worthless, because the blockages that matter belong to owners the court order doesn’t cover.
I’ve spent a lot of airtime on state spending, and this is a whopper. All of it aimed at one outcome: get adult salmon back to the gravel.
And every one of those fish, after the culvert is replaced and the estuary restored, still swims past the same few hundred yards of river.
Herschel the sea lion turned the Ballard Locks into a sushi bar
In the 1980s, a California sea lion parked himself at the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks and ate steelhead as they stacked up waiting to move from salt water to fresh. A fisherman is said to have named him Herschel after a guy he used to work with on the docks. The name outlived the animal. Herschel became whatever the biggest male was that winter.
A condo near the locks hung a sign reading “Herschel’s Sushi Bar.”
So we tried things. Game agents spent the winter of 1986 setting off waterproof firecrackers called seal bombs. In March 1989, the state Senate voted 34 to 12 to let agents kill seals and sea lions threatening fish runs, and some supporters wore buttons reading “Take a bite out of Herschel.” When Congress reauthorized the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1994, it added a nuisance clause naming the Ballard Locks. That fall, five sea lions were approved for lethal removal.
It never happened. Conservation groups pushed back, Vice President Al Gore got involved, and the authorization went unused.
Greenpeace argued at the time that blaming a handful of sea lions let everybody ignore the sewage, the runoff, the logging, and the overfishing. They had a point.
The stage was set. The run collapsed. By the mid-1990s it was under 200 fish a year, down from 2,500 a decade earlier.
The sea lions left on their own, because there was nothing left worth eating.
Washington tribes, anglers, and state biologists all back the sea lion bill
The Northwest Endangered Salmon Predation Prevention Act, HR 9621, was introduced July 9. Behind it: the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, the Puget Sound Anglers, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Treaty tribes, sport fishermen, and state biologists have spent 40 years arguing with each other. They agree on this. Andy Walgamott at Northwest Sportsman covered Tuesday’s hearing.
Ed Johnstone Jr., chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, called the predation “an existential threat to already depressed salmon stocks.” He also said this: “We are looking at a future without salmon.”
The Marine Mammal Protection Act worked so well it created this problem
Seals and sea lions were in bad shape in 1972, and 50 years of protection under the Marine Mammal Protection Act brought them all the way back. Johnstone says harbor seals in Washington’s inside waters are now at carrying capacity, the polite way of saying the house is full.
That law has no gear for what happens when a fully recovered protected predator starts eating a fish sliding toward extinction.
The bill lets the state and treaty tribes apply for permits to remove animals where they’re doing damage: the Columbia beyond the current narrow zone, Puget Sound, and the coast. Removals have to be humane, carried out by state and tribal professionals, not hunters. The annual cap is 10% of what scientists calculate a population can lose without shrinking. And if the science says removals are no longer needed, the Secretary shuts the program down. A government program with an off switch. I checked the bill text to make sure it was real.
Asked at the hearing whether this opens the door to widespread killing, WDFW’s Nate Pamplin said: “That is not something envisioned in the bill, and it’s not something we would do.” Struggling populations are excluded by definition.
Willamette Falls sea lion removals cut extinction risk from 89% to 11%
We’ve run this experiment. This time we have numbers.
Bonneville Dam sits 145 river miles up the Columbia from the Pacific, and the sea lions swim all the way up. Since 2008, under tightly limited permits, 562 have been removed there and at Willamette Falls. Since 2020, WDFW estimates those removals saved roughly 39,000 fall-run fish and 25,000 spring Chinook.
At Willamette Falls, the winter steelhead run faced an 89% risk of extinction.
After removals started, that risk fell to 11%.
A few hundred animals, out of populations in the tens of thousands. Compare that to $1 million a day.
In Puget Sound, the problem starts before the salmon leave home. Research in the Nisqually delta found harbor seals eating between 9% and 33% of young steelhead trying to swim out to sea. They’re getting picked off in the driveway.
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Southern resident orcas are starving for the same Chinook
The southern resident killer whales are the most beloved animals in this state. We put them on license plates. We convened a governor’s task force. We’ve spent millions, and they’re still in trouble. They eat Chinook, almost exclusively, and there aren’t enough.
The same 1972 law that protects the harbor seal in the Nisqually estuary protects the orca that needed the salmon that seal just ate. Refusing to manage one recovered species means quietly sentencing another. That’s just picking the animal with the better publicity.
The case against killing sea lions
We built the dams and locks that pinned the salmon into these bottlenecks, and now we want to shoot the animals smart enough to exploit our mistake. The Washington State Academy of Sciences said in a 2022 review that the “preponderance of evidence” points to seals and sea lions as a contributing factor, stopping short of certainty. And plenty of people will say the answer is better non-lethal deterrence.
Take those in order. We built the bottlenecks, and we’re spending $7 billion unbuilding them, which is exactly why letting it get eaten at the last checkpoint makes no sense. “Preponderance of evidence” is the standard that decides most civil cases in America. And on non-lethal tools, we have 40 years of results at the Ballard Locks. A firecracker stings for a second. A Chinook dinner is a Chinook dinner. The bill funds more non-lethal research anyway. If somebody invents the thing that works, the shooting stops.
A second bill from Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a southwest Washington Democrat, would go further, giving tribes removal authority on their own terms. Three members of Washington’s delegation, from both parties and both ends of the state, have landed on the same uncomfortable conclusion.
Washington built salmon a $7 billion road home. Somebody has to police the end of it
A million dollars a day. Nearly $4 billion spent, billions more to come, on a court deadline, in a state that can’t balance its budget.
On “Seattle’s Morning News,” we spend a lot of time on Washington’s roads, and the short version is grim. This state ranks near the bottom of the country for keeping its transportation infrastructure in decent shape. There’s no money. And one reason there’s no money is that billions of transportation dollars are going into culverts instead of pavement.
So follow the whole absurdity around the loop. We’re watching our roads crumble to pay for salmon passage. We’re spending $100 million on stream crossings that nine other barriers make useless. We’re sitting through years of orange cones and detours while the crews dig. And after all that, we can’t bring ourselves to do the one thing that makes sure the fish we spent all this money on actually survive the trip.
We’ll spend the billions. We’ll endure the construction. We just won’t pull the trigger.
The sea lions are doing exactly what two million years of evolution built them to do, in a spot we built for them, under a law we wrote. Every other fisherman on those rivers lives with a season, a limit, and a count. Tribal, sport, commercial, all of them.
The bill asks the last unlimited diner at the table to live with a limit too.
I still love the drunk uncles on the dock. I’d just rather they didn’t eat the whole river.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
