We’re now at Rancho Marino Reserve on the beautiful San Luis Obispo Coast. This location has an amazing number of marine mammals, including humpback whales, sea otters, harbor seals, and a resident group of California sea lions. Today, one of the students noticed one of sea lions wasn’t looking so good. She had a huge bite taken out of her side, almost definitely from a great white shark. Wild animals can be amazing at healing from wounds, but this one looked fatal, at least without intervention.

Some of the students wanted to take action. With the reserve manager’s permission, they contacted the Marine Mammal Rescue. The folks at this non-profit organization are quite good at their jobs—they have saved the lives countless critters. They also do the invaluable service of collecting data on mammal strandings and mortalities, which can point to harmful algal blooms, extreme weather events, or other phenomena. However, because the sea lion was at the bottom of a cliff without a clear access point, they were not able to help. Unfortunately, this sea lion will either slowly succumb to her wounds or, unable to forage for fish, eventually die of starvation.

It’s human nature to empathize with a fellow being and want to help assuage its pain. But no one ever said the natural world is a benevolent place. Famously, Alfred Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw”. Seals getting bitten by sharks is a perfectly natural (and, if witnessed, awesome!) occurrence along the shore of the Central Coast. While this particular seal’s death won’t provide a meal for a white shark eat, it will mean food for an innumerable and diverse array of scavengers and decomposers.

This desire humans have to help the living things around us can get us into trouble. Wounded animals can lash out at a potential savior, causing injury. Creatures can seem injured because they are sick with something contagious like rabies, and trying to help can be truly life threatening. Often folks think a young animal, like a baby bird or a fawn, is injured when it’s actually totally fine. In that case “helping” actually results in harm. Even if a critter is truly injured and the correct professionals take over the care, saving and rehabilitating animals can be time consuming, expensive, and unfortunately often unsuccessful. I realize it’s not a zero sum game, but putting the resources dedicated to rescue instead toward a beach clean up or toward lobbying the local government to preserve open space would definitely save far more beings in the long run. If it was just me who had found the seal, I wouldn’t have called Marine Mammal Rescue.

To me, the calculus swings in favor of intervention for two reasons. The first is if the injury is the direct result of humans. I would have called if the sea lion was entangled in a fishing net. The second is if the animal is threatened or endangered. I would absolutely call if I was on a beach in Hawaii and found an endangered Hawaiian Monk Seal with a shark bite. Reasonable people can definitely disagree with me about when intervention is appropriate. I okayed the students’ decision to reach out Marine Mammal Rescue, and I would have felt elated if they were able to rescue and rehabilitate the sea lion (or, based on how poorly she looked, if they at least could have quickly euthanized her to end her suffering). But importantly, the decision to intervene needs to be made rationally, with a full appraisal of the situation.

About once a run I take critter saving into my own hands and rescue a bat caught in a room or a lizard stuck to an insect sticky trap. Earlier this run, students came to me because a silly quail chick had been stuck in one of the seasonal cabins for a couple of hours, despite the door being wide open. With the help of Eric, my teaching assistant, I was able to corral the bird and release it back into the wild, pretty much making me a wildlife hero!