\u201cYoung California sea lions, especially in their first year or first months, in this case, of foraging on their own \u2026 have really have quite kind of an uphill challenge to try and find food sources,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily uncommon to see younger malnourished sea lion pups that haven\u2019t taken to developing these important skills out in the open ocean to wind up in areas that would seem out of habitat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Irving is about 40 pounds \u2014 half of the normal weight of a pup his age, according to Rulli. On Friday, the Marine Mammal Center conducted an admission exam, and was waiting on further blood testing to determine if he has any underlying ailments.<\/p>\n
If his temperament is any indication, though, Rulli said Irving looked pretty good.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring [his] exams, this young sea lion was very active and quite feisty,\u201d Rulli said. \u201cWhich, in terms of positive initial signs, is generally something that we\u2019re looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rulli said Irving is still early in the rehabilitation process and is still being tube-fed. No long-term plan for his release has been set yet, but usually malnourished pups remain at the Marine Mammal Center for six to ten weeks, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYoung California sea lions, especially in their first year or first months, in this case, of foraging on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-591154","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}