On saturday, Rose and I, Jacqueline, decided to go to Killer Dana in Dana Point California and see how much just the two of us can make a change by picking up trash. We took 1 hour out of our day to pick up trash down the beach and rocks near the killer dana bluffs and ran into some pretty shocking things... we found a lot of trash not just laying on the sand but entangled n the seaweed, buried under rocks, in caves, and the saddest was finding a ballon wrapped around the neck of a dead California sea lion.

we cleaned up all of the trash we saw on the beach and made our way to the rocks and a horrible smell blew our way, us finding a dead dolphin who has been beached and laying on the rocks for about a month maybe more. we walked a quarter of a mile and soon smelled the same smell, looking for a dead animal and could barely find this one, we found a big dead sea lion entangled in seaweed and under driftwood with a balloon around its neck, you could tell this one has been here for a while because its skull was showing... we go to the end of the trail and find that we cannot go further because the tide was too high. As we start to turn around we find a sea lion about 6-7 feet long laying behind a rock, this one was newly dead and must have dies the night before or that morning. we start to head back to the beach and notice something moving on the rocks. we get closer and realize it is a California sea lion pup! you could visibly see its spine and hip bones and he could barely move, we sat and watched it for a little and noticed it barely had any energy, so a person from another group called and reported him in.

We kept going on our beach walk and about 4 hours later the animal control drives past us. We wen to ask him if he had come to get the sea lion and he said yes so we waited for the pacific marine mammal center to arrive. As soon as the volunteer showed up, we started our mile walk back to the sea lion pup, who apparently started having seizures, we got to the place and could not find him, and the people were saying we were too late and that it had passed away 2 minutes before we got there. 

we carried the pups body back with us to do an etopsy on the sea lions body and figure out if the pacific marine mammal center could figure out a way to help them.

i cannot explain how shocked i was to see all these dead animals today. it was horrifying and i realized that you should never give up hope for these animals and do not hesitate to call the mammal center.