necropsies we have noticed a few trends that are fairly interesting to further
investigate. For example, we have noticed that starving seals develop hyposplenism
which appears to have no blood left in it. This phenomenon has never been studied
on any animal and the data is going to be analyzed for further conclusions.
The PMMC inhabits harbor seals, sea lions and elephant seals at the moment, but is
struggling for any stranded marine mammal. These days, most of them are
malnourished pups as the California area is experiencing a major seal-starvation
crisis in the past few months. The cause is still undefined, but the postulation is that
past El-Niño and the ocean warming has caused the regular fish communities
occupying the area to move further into the deep cooler water. This has led the sealmoms to go further in to forage for food. Consequently, the pups were left alone for
longer periods of time or even lost their moms forever. The starving weak pups can't
forage just yet, so they are washed ashore, desperately looking for fish in the
shallow reefs, where lung parasites (Parafilaroides spp.) reside in the fish, waiting to
prosper in the poor seal's lungs. Once it has, there is no way back and the seal will
start coughing progressively harder and will eventually be euthanized. Deworming
them won't help as there is no way to eliminate the massive amount of dead worms
from the lungs afterwards.
Harbor seal