Steller's Sea Lion
From Freepedia
| Steller's Sea Lion Conservation status: Endangered | ||||||||||||||||
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| Image:Steller sea lion bull.jpg Steller Sea Lion bull | ||||||||||||||||
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| Eumetopias jubatus (Schreber, 1776) |
The Steller's Sea Lion (Eumetopias jubatus), also known as the Northern Sea Lion, is a sea lion of the temperate eastern Pacific, named by Georg Steller.It is the largest of the eared seals, measuring up to 3.3 m in length and weighing 1,100 kg. Its range extends from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia to the Gulf of Alaska in the north, and down to the Farallon Islands off central California (they formerly bred in the Channel Islands but have not been observed there since the 1980s. . Steller's Sea Lions were listed as threatened on the U.S. endangered species list in the 1990s and have since been the object of intense study. One suspected cause of their precipitous fall in numbers is overfishing of wall-eyed pollock and other fish stocks in the Gulf of Alaska.
