“I know what it’s like to be left behind”

The planet is totally screwed but still populated with lovely people.

Exhibit One: At Ventura today there was an emaciated juvenile sea lion washed up on the beach; alive, in pain, and dying. The abnormal wind patterns and warmer waters have driven the prey for the mother sea lions further away from the Channel Islands and deeper in the Pacific, so mothers are taking longer to get food and more offspring are lost or set off on their own search for food. Hundreds are being washed up on the California coast; so many that the rescue teams can just post signs but not retrieve them all. The little guy here was alive but not for long.

Exhibit Two: This Velella is one of the beautiful blue jellyfish that are being washed ashore by the thousands in Oregon and California. The Velella are each their own biological Kon-Tiki with a sail that sits above the water that causes them to move with the wind. Amazingly Velellas that live on opposite sides of the Pacific and on opposite sides of the equator have their fins arranged in a different orientation to allow them to track according to the prevailing winds. When the winds are seasonally unusual or unusually strong, they end up on the beaches like today.

Exhibit Three: During the discussion on the beach about the sea lion, we noticed a duckling that had become separated from its mother and the rest of her brood splashing in the surf. By the time we noticed, mother and siblings were heading out to sea away from the hubbub. “Oh no, how do we get him back to his mother?” cried Claire. At this point a young man took off his shoes and shirt, gave his keys and phone to his mother, grabbed the duckling in his hat, said “I know what it’s like to be left behind”, then swam out with the duckling in its own little lifeboat and reunited it with its mother.

We would have loved to get to know more about his past experience and to have thanked him. Screwed up ecosystem in all sorts of ways.

Sea Lions Washed Ashore
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/starving-sea-lions-washing-ashore-by-the-hundreds-in-california.html?_r=0

Velellas On The Beaches
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/weird-blue-jellyfish-are-washing-up-on-oregons-beaches