From a healthy population in the Gulf of California, Mexico, these young California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus) spend their youth practicing being adults. Playing all day, they learn swimming skills from the older ones, and in doing so, they learn what in later years will be skills for battles of survival, competition with other members of the same sex, and mating. Graceful animals in the water, they showed us - simple humans in the water, laden with fins, wetsuits and masks with snorkels - how well they can swim, how well they can turn and stop, and accelerate.
These lovely animals belonging to the family of the Otariidae, or eared seals, have very flexible bodies, huge whiskers and pass part of their lives on land, where, after folding their hind limbs forward, they can walk with quite an ease on rocks, and climb to better sunning sites than their brethren. Their swimming power is given by the forward extremities, with the fins usually giving them stability and direction.
Looking carefully at a good number of them, we saw that some had scars around the necks, or even worse: nylon lines tight around their bodies, acquired while playing with these lines in the water, or while robbing captured fish in nets set by humans to obtain their daily meals.
