Marine Mammal Center Urges Beachgoers to Give Harbor Seal Pups Space This Season

Spring and early summer are the busiest months at the Marine Mammal Center, with the rescue hotline ringing constantly and the hospital in the Marin Headlands filling with patients. Many of these patients are harbor seal pups, born on local beaches from March through June.

The center is issuing an urgent message for anyone walking the California coast: the most helpful thing you can do for a marine mammal is often the hardest thing to do.

While it is natural to want to help a small seal alone on the sand, harbor seal mothers routinely leave their pups on the beach while they forage at sea, sometimes for hours. A pup resting alone is almost always waiting for its mother to return; it is not abandoned or dying.

However, if people or dogs crowd a resting pup, the mother may flee and, if scared away repeatedly, could abandon the pup permanently, leaving a healthy newborn without the nutrition it needs to survive.

Last year, over 235 animals—more than a quarter of the marine mammals rescued by trained responders—had been affected by human or dog disturbance. Half of Marin County’s disturbance cases fell into the “severe” category, which included physically touching, feeding, moving, or pouring water on animals.

These well-intentioned behaviors can lead to life-threatening separations for harbor seal pups.

The Marine Mammal Center advises beachgoers to give marine mammals at least 50 yards of space—roughly half a football field—and to keep dogs leashed at that same distance. People should watch from afar and enjoy the encounter without alerting others, as even a small crowd can be disruptive.

If you see an animal with an open wound, tangled in ocean trash or plastic, coughing, having seizures, struggling to breathe, or a very young pup so skinny that its ribs or hip bones are visible, call the rescue hotline at 415-289-SEAL (7325). The center’s team will assess the situation and, if needed, safely bring the animal in for care.

Do not attempt to intervene yourself.

Since its founding in 1975, the Marine Mammal Center has rescued and treated more than 27,000 marine mammals along the California coast and in Hawaii. The animals that never need to come to the center because beachgoers gave them space to thrive on their own are the success stories most celebrated.

Marin’s coastline is home to extraordinary wildlife.