Australian sea lion

Appearance

Females are either silver or fawn with a cream underbelly, and males are dark brown with a yellow mane and are bigger than the females.

Published measurements include mass about 7.15.

Also in the 1930s, the animal was described informally as "rather fond of penguins".

Range and habitat

Australian sea lions are sparsely distributed across their range, from the Houtman Abrolhos Islands (28°S, 114°E) in Western Australia, along the southern Australian coast to The Pages Islands (35°46'S, 138°18'E) in South Australia. Most breeding colonies exist on offshore islands, with the exception of Point Labatt in South Australia, Baxter Cliffs (west of Twilight Cove) in Western Australia, and the Bunda Cliffs, Great Australian Bight, that straddles the border between the two states. About 42% of the total known population is found within the three largest colonies east of Port Lincoln. Seal Bay (on Kangaroo Island's south coast), The Pages, and Dangerous Reef (in Spencer Gulf).

Jones Island, west of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, is one of the few sites where the population is not decreasing. In 1909, field naturalists lobbied for the protection of three critical breeding sites for the Australian sea lion: Dangerous Reef, The Pages, and the Casuarina Islets off Kangaroo Island.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet and breeding

Australian sea lions have been described as opportunistic, benthic foragers. Limited stomach-content and faecal analyses have identified a wide variety of prey in the diet of the Australian sea lion, among them teleost fish (among them blue-throated wrasse and whiting), squid, cuttlefish, octopus, sharks (among them Port Jackson sharks), rays, southern rock lobster, other small crustaceans, and little penguins.

This supports previous evidence that this species forages primarily on neritic, benthic prey, many of that are nonmigratory. For the cephalopod component of the Australian sea lion diet, octopus and giant Australian cuttlefish made up the greatest biomass of prey taxa. As of 2020, 66 breeding colonies have been identified: 28 in Western Australia and 38 in South Australia.

In crisis

It is currently monotypic in the genus Neophoca, with the extinct Pleistocene New Zealand sea lion Neophoca palatina the only known congener. With a population estimated at 14,730 animals, the Wildlife Conservation Act of Western Australia (1950) has listed them as "in need of special protection". Their conservation status is listed as endangered.

By 2014, the population was listed at an estimated 6,500 mature adult sea lions and continues to decrease, if assuming the adult population is more than half of the total. The population is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Australian sea lion is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Australian sea lion, Wikidata item Q744392. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.