by Mark McDermott
The toxic algal bloom sickening and killing marine mammals up and down the Southern California coast is showing some of its most severe impacts in Manhattan Beach, where dozens of sea lions and dolphins have been found stranded on the beach since February.
The Marine Mammal Care Center has been overtasked as the sole responder to these strandings. The San Pedro-based nonprofit employs two staff members daily who are responsible for the rescues of sick animals along the entire Los Angeles County coast. Their facility also cares for the marine mammals who have been rescued from stranding, roughly 60 percent who survive with treatment.
But the Marine Mammal Care Center is struggling to keep up with the scale of the unfolding crisis. This is the fourth straight year marine mammals have suffered from domoic acid poisoning, but has been the worst year on record, both for the number of animals affected and the severity of the poisoning. Additionally, a second and even more toxic algal bloom, called saxitoxin, is amplifying both the pervasiveness and the deadliness of the poisoning. The Care Center has had to build additional enclosures in its parking lot to house sick animals. At present, 87 animals are patients at the facility.
“We have had 346 animals in our care since January, and we budget for 300 animals for the entire calendar year,” said John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center. “So the volume is quite concerning in terms of the overall capacity to continue operations for the entire year. That just includes the number of animals who have been rescued. The number of animals [affected], including dead animals and animals we couldn’t get to or that might not still be there when we do arrive, would be at least double that.”
Several cities, including Manhattan Beach, are considering entering a more formal partnership with the Marine Mammal Care Center. The City Council will discuss the issue at an upcoming meeting in May. An issue for cities is the longer the animals remain on the beach, the more of a public safety issue it becomes. Jackie May, a Manhattan Beach resident who volunteers with the Marine Mammal Care Center, took Mayor Amy Howorth to the facility early in the crisis to witness its impact.
“This is a heartbreaking situation to watch unfold,” Howorth said. “It’s also a public health issue because beach goers approach sick animals not realizing that the domoic acid poisoning causes them to go mad and become dangerously aggressive.”
The LA County Board of Supervisors is also considering providing funds for the Care Center.
“We have had domoic acid events for four straight years and this is the worst year yet, wreaking havoc on our sea lions,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn. “But this isn’t something our County’s Animal Care and Control is prepared to cope with. Instead, we have relied on the Marine Mammal Care Center who is doing everything they can to save these sick animals, but they are being overwhelmed and their budget is at the breaking point. My office has been able to step in to help in years past when donations didn’t keep up with the needs, but they need a more reliable funding source, and I hope we can find them one.”
The rescues are mostly sea lions, and a few seals. But what has been unusual in this poisoning event is that dolphins and whales are also being impacted.
“The number of dolphins who are stranding and dying is unprecedented,” Warner said.
Several dolphins have washed up in Manhattan Beach. Unlike sea lions, there is no possibility the dolphins can be rescued.
“The dolphins that strand, with these factors, it is a mortality event,” Warner said. “There is no rehab that is going to be effective.”
Several factors have made this a worst case scenario, fundamentally for the animals, but also for their rescuers. Though algal blooms occur naturally, the composition of ocean waters is impacted by human activity. The first signs of domoic acid poisoning started to appear in December. The Pacific Palisades fires occurred the second week of January. Biologists can not yet definitively say the ocean runoff that resulted from the fires caused the toxic blooms to worsen, but it appears likely.
“When we talk about the cause of these blooms, these things started showing up in our environment before the fires,” Warner said. “So when we look at the fires, we look at contributory factors for the size, scope, scale, and toxicity. And this bloom sort of takes the cake on all these fronts, in terms of what it is doing. And the fact that this is a multi-toxin event — there’s domoic acid, but also saxitoxin, which is even deadlier than domoic acid in terms of how that toxin affects marine mammals.”
Two years ago, marine biologists witnessed what had been the worst wave of domoic acid poisoning that had been experienced locally. But this year is far worse, both in terms of the numbers, and just how sick the animals have become. Warner said this bloom is far more toxic than previous occurrences. Studies are underway to determine exactly why, and what role saxitoxin is playing.
“One of the things that we’re trying to figure out is how much [of the toxins] are in the environment right now and are affecting marine mammal health,” he said. “We know just by the symptoms that we see in sea lions and dolphins that domoic acid is obviously very present and affecting these animals. The seizure activity, the foaming of the mouth, the sort of comatose states that they’re landing in are all classic domoic acid. But the net effect on the health of animals this year is greater than we saw even in 2023, and that was the worst year up to that point. Then, saxitoxin started showing up about three or four weeks into the domoic acid event. So you just don’t know which one is having the worst effect on the health of these animals.”
The toxins were present in the marine environment throughout January but the impact intensified exponentially in February. By March, local beaches were inundated with sick, dying, and dead animals. At that time, biologist Eric Martin, co-director of the Roundhouse Aquarium, warned the City Council that this was the worst such event of its kind he had witnessed.
“Just today, we had five dolphins coming up on the beach,” he said at the March 18 council meeting. “A young teenager from Las Vegas almost got hit in the head with a [sea lion] tail because it’s flopping on the beach. Sea lions are turning crazy, and people think that they want to get selfies with them.”
Domoic acid is a neurotoxin, meaning it eats away at the brains of marine life, causing erratic and sometimes violent behavior in the animals, as well as their deaths. It originates with a neurotoxin called Pseudo-nitzschia australis that accumulates in plankton and small fish and works its way up the food chain.
“The sardines are eating it, and then the sea lions are eating the sardines, and the whole food chain is coming up,” Martin said. “What does it do? It turns the brain crazy, so the animal has no idea what it is doing. So if someone sees a dolphin, don’t try to turn it around and get it back in the water. It will come back up again. It’s a death sentence for the dolphin.”
Martin witnessed 30 to 40 seabirds dying daily as well.
A young humpback whale washed ashore in Orange County in January that appeared to have suffered domoic acid poisoning. Last week, a rare minke whale was stranded in Long Beach Harbor. Only 300 of the animals exist along the Pacific Ocean. Warner said the minke likely also died from poisoning but tests are still underway.
“Long Beach Harbor is not a place where you would normally see a minke whale,” he said.
Domoic acid poisoning events have historically occurred once every four to seven years, so the fact that Southern California has experienced four consecutive years has concerned biologists. But their attempts to understand why this is occurring has been further hampered by the fact that the agency that usually studies marine mammals and particularly their deaths, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has experienced massive budget cuts induced by the Trump Administration. Normally, the MMCC and rescuers from other counties would send samples of the deceased animals to more definitely understand what has occurred to them. The NOAA, which also conducts population studies of sea lions, no longer has the capacity to perform studies of the animals, alive or dead.
“The NOAA has had all their funding frozen,” Warner said. “They would normally take the lead on this. We would provide samples and they pay for the testing in different labs. That support is not available. So what we are trying to figure out is how do we get these tests done? How do we build data from this, so that what is now this unprecedented event, especially with cetaceans, does not get lost to future research?”
Another compounding factor is this algal bloom occurred earlier in the year than it has previously, coinciding with the season in which sea lions carry babies.
“About 85 percent of the sea lions we have rescued are pregnant,” Warner said. “So normally, we flush [the poisoning] out with hydration, IV fluids, and nutrition. But now, we flush it out and it just goes right back, because it is in the amniotic fluids. So they are just constantly sick, and even the drugs we would normally use to induce labor aren’t working, which is unheard of. So you’ve got all these health factors that also need to be researched, like why, after giving multiple doses, are animals still not induced into labor? You just wait for them to abort a fetus. Volunteers and staff, the first thing they do in the morning is collect aborted fetuses. It’s emotionally quite intense.
To understand the unprecedented nature of what is occurring, much needs to be studied, including the interaction between the two different toxic algal blooms, their causes, and each animal’s cause of death.
“But we also want to look at the histology of brains, of organs, which are very expensive tests,” Warner said. “Toxicology for both pennipeds and cetaceans, because we want to understand what the runoff from the fires is doing to marine mammal health. These types of tests need to be annual for the next three to five years…You need a large sample size. So to really do a study that helps us understand the short term, medium term and long term effect from these unprecedented environmental disasters, is probably a $250,000 to $500,000 research project at a time when that is not available from the federal government.”
Warner said it is critical that these studies still occur because as unprecedented as this circumstance is, wildfires are an increasingly regular contributor to ocean runoff.
“I think it’s very important for all of us who live in Southern California to understand what the consequences are of these fires, both for the sheer knowledge, and because it can help us maybe mitigate future fire impacts and what they do in terms of ecological damage,” he said. “Understanding all these human-exacerbated factors is important if we are going to turn things around. We want to be able to conduct all this research to help us understand what the fires did, in terms of a net effect, and what were the other factors, such as rain water and temperatures and La Niña coming into play.”
The Marine Mammal Care Center and other rescuers and environmental organizations are trying to step up their own efforts and thereby fill the void left by the federal government. But to do so will require help from state, regional, and local governments. The MMCC’s core mission, rescuing and rehabilitating sick animals, has already expanded beyond its current capacities.
“So when we get a call from Santa Monica, which along with Manhattan Beach is a hotspot for strandings, it can be an hour and a half to get there, a half hour to get the animal, and an hour and a half back to our hospital,” he said. “So if I’ve got two people, they can do that twice in one day. That’s not a lot for the volume of animals stranding. So why I am talking to cities and the County Board of Supervisors is because this service is not just about animal welfare. It’s about public safety, and public health. And it is not resourced for the readiness of response that I think is appropriate or needed if you really are putting public safety and public health front and center. We will do the work. But for us to take on those factors above animal welfare requires a public private partnership. Otherwise, it’s not possible to do it.”
The MMCC has 21 employees and 380 volunteers. Warner said private philanthropy makes up 80 percent of MMCC funding. That remains essential, but more will be needed as the organization’s mission expands.
“If you ask, what do we need? Donations and volunteers are important,” he said. “It’s Earth Day as we speak, right? People, and their actions, have so much power with our voices, and when you add that into a collective voice, we’ve seen time and again how things change when we all use our voices to demand what is needed from our elected officials and our governments. We need people to keep using those voices if we are going to turn this around, because these environmental factors are changing rapidly due to human exacerbation of the issues at hand — climate change, warm waters on the ocean’s surface, acidification, and massive amounts of runoff into our ocean. Those things have to be voiced as important enough by our citizens for anyone at the government level to take action. So that is what I would ask on this Earth Day.”
Supervisor Holly Mitchell, whose district includes the Beach Cities, said that she has heard the message loud and clear.
“Since 2023, when we experienced the first domoic acid crisis, my office has been working with the Marine Mammal Care Center to support the critical work they do to rescue animals by providing funding and assisting with accessing medicine,” she said. “The impacts of global warming are undeniable and are only getting worse, which means addressing this crisis requires a collective effort. We will be taking additional steps at our upcoming Board of Supervisors meeting to help raise public awareness and identify sustainable solutions.” ER
