A sea lion attacked a nine-year-old girl who was taking a surf lesson at Monterey County’s Asilomar State Beach, though the young surfer is doing just fine, except for a few sea lion-bite puncture wounds.
There are not many sea lions down at Fisherman's Wharf’s Pier 39 in San Francisco right now, after last year’s spring and summer surge. The Pier 39 sea lion live webcam shows only about two dozen of them there on this early August day, though it is normal that they’re gone this time of year, and they may be thousands strong again by late August or early September. They have simply decamped to the south for the mating season, and there are many sea lions 100 or more miles to the south, in places like, say, Monterey County’s Asilomar State Beach.
We mention Asilomar State Beach, because that’s where this weekend saw the highly unusual incident of a sea lion biting a nine-year-old girl, according to Monterey’s KSBW. The girl was one of five youngsters who were in the ocean for a surf lesson, and the quick thinking of their surf instructor may have saved the young surfers from a much worse outcome.
“It was right next to me, and I was like ‘Oh my gosh, something really bad is going to happen.' Then it just bit me,” the nine-year-old sea lion-bit victim Corale Olsen told KSBW. “It was pain, and then I was screaming.”
The five kids’ surf instructor Alex De Marignac said he had no idea the attack was coming.
“I have surfed in these waters since I was about 6-years-old, but never ever seen something like that,” De Marignac said to the station. “I feel like most kids kind of like go after sea lions lightly, and nothing happens.”
This time something did happen, and De Marignac quickly hauled the little one to shore. “I had two kids under each arm and then one hanging off my neck, and yeah, we all made it in,” he told KSBW.
Young Corale Olsen was treated for puncture wounds from the bite, and received ER medical care for the remainder of the day. Sea lions biting people is an extremely rare phenomenon, though not unheard of. Aggressive behavior can be linked to domoic acid poisoning from toxic algae blooms, or maybe the animal was just being territorial.
Or this could be a situation like summer 2023’s exploits of the surfboard-stealing Otter 841 not far from there in Santa Cruz. After that otter spent months menacing surfers and kayakers, we learned that she was pregnant the whole time, and the behavior was likely due to hormones.
Image: Close up of an Australian fur seal with its mouth wide open barking at the camera (Getty Images)
