They can't see the net until it's too late.
For a California sea lion — fast, agile, playful — a discarded or lost fishing net is one of the most insidious threats in the ocean. The animals swim into the mesh while hunting. It wraps around their necks, their flippers, their bodies. The tighter they struggle, the tighter it holds. Without intervention, entanglement is fatal.
But for 81 California sea lions in the Gulf of California, intervention came in time.
**The Rescue**
Sea Shepherd's marine conservation vessel *Seahorse*, operating in close partnership with Mexican federal authorities and local organisations, completed its **seventh disentanglement campaign** at Isla San Jorge, Sonora, in early March 2026 — freeing **13 more California sea lions** from entangled fishing nets.
The operation was particularly focused on the most vulnerable: **pups and juveniles**, whose smaller size makes them especially susceptible to entanglement, and whose deaths represent a generational loss for the population.
This latest campaign brings the total number of sea lions rescued through these coordinated operations at Isla San Jorge to **81 individuals**.
**Why It Matters More Than It Looks**
On one level, 81 animals sounds modest. California sea lions number in the hundreds of thousands — they're not critically endangered.
But the waters where these rescues occur are not ordinary waters. The *Seahorse* patrols the **vaquita refuge** in the northern Gulf of California — the last stronghold of the **vaquita porpoise**, the world's most endangered marine mammal, with fewer than 10 individuals believed to survive. Illegal gillnets set to catch totoaba fish — whose swim bladder fetches extraordinary prices on the black market — are the primary reason the vaquita is on the edge of extinction.
Those same nets don't discriminate. They kill vaquita. They kill totoaba. And they kill sea lions.
Every net removed from the water, every entangled animal freed, is part of a single continuous effort to make the Gulf of California survivable again — not just for one species, but for many.
**Sea Shepherd's Presence**
Sea Shepherd has maintained a continuous vessel presence in the vaquita refuge since 2015, working alongside the Mexican Navy and environmental authorities in one of the longest-running marine patrol operations by a conservation organisation anywhere in the world.
The organisation is also planning a separate ghost net recovery campaign in the **Baltic Sea** in 2026, where lost and discarded fishing gear poses severe risks to Baltic Sea porpoises and other marine life.
In April 2025, a single operation freed 20 sea lions. In October 2025, 13 more. Now 13 again in March 2026.
One by one, net by net, they keep coming back.
*Sources: Sea Shepherd (seashepherd.org), March 13, 2026*
