They’re Breeders Of The Pack

Big Frank’s commanding bark sounds like the wheeze of a bagpipe. It is big, brassy, bossy.

The voice of a leader.

The voice of a lover.

“Ork! Ork! Ork!,” booms the ex-Seattle “Bad Boy” with the number “225” tattooed on his broad brown back.

“Irk-irk-irk,” bleats a sweet, tiny voice.

The tentative bark comes from a slick, black California sea lion pup venturing out from beneath Mom’s protective flipper at Sea World’s Pacific Point Preserve exhibit.

The curious pup waddles clumsily to water’s edge, dips in a little leathery flipper, and cranes his head back to see if Mom is watching.

“Oooooh,” coos a tourist with a thick Southern accent. “Ya’ll see him? Ya’ll see that sweet li’l baby lift his itty-bitty head?”

Only weeks old and no bigger than a sack of spuds, the pup is one of 10 born in the past month at the marine park. All are almost certainly the progeny of “the Bad Boys of Ballard,” the sea lions placed on a federal hit list after gorging themselves on dwindling winter steelhead stocks at the Ballard Locks in Seattle.

“The chances of the Seattle sea lions being fathers of these pups is 95 to 100 percent,” said Jack Pearson, curator of mammals for the Anheuser-Busch-owned park.

Three of the blubbery Bad Boys - Hondo (branded No. 17 by Washington state wildlife agents), Bob (No. 45, now at Sea World of Texas) and Frank (No. 225) were shipped to the Florida park in a last-minute reprieve engineered last summer by Vice President Al Gore and Sea World administrators.

It turned out to be the “Summer of Love” for the bachelor trio.

Most of the boys in the Florida exhibit were neutered.

Most of the girls were in heat.

And the ratio was 2-to-1, female to male.

Sea World curators welcomed the fresh genetic material.

“We had not had any real new blood in the sea lion population in a few years,” said Pearson. “This was a chance to get the genetic diversity you need for a long-term breeding program.”

Animal rights groups had a different take.

“Wildlife, including sea lions, should not be bred for captivity at Sea World or any other commercial circus,” said Will Anderson, with the Progressive Animal Welfare Society advocacy department in Lynnwood, Wash.

“Unless captive breeding is done to propagate an endangered species that will be returned to the wild, PAWS opposes it.”

California sea lion pups are not endangered and cannot be returned to the wild. The current crop of Florida pups, once they are weaned and their blood is typed to determine paternity, may be split up.

Some may remain in the exhibit. Some may be transferred to other Sea World parks.

A few may even become show animals. The sea lion show at the 200-acre Florida park features large bulls somersaulting, high-fiving, doing flipper stands, and “singing” to musical ads for Diet Pepsi.

To prevent surplus populations in the future, Sea World curators will tighten controls on breeding. They may separate the Bad Boys from females in heat, allow them access to only a select few - or eventually, when the bloodlines are well-established, neuter them.

“Someday, for the sake of the population, neutering may be called for,” said Pearson.

The population at Pacific Point numbers a robust 68 California sea lions. They are joined by 17 harbor seals and two South American fur seals in a realistic-looking exhibit - two acres of simulated rock cliffs, fake barnacles and machine-generated waves modeled after the Northwest coast.

More than 90 percent of the animals are captive-born. Many are offspring of rescued animals.

Exhibit caretakers say Big Frank’s prominent “225” brand draws endless questions from tourists.

“We tell them the Seattle story,” said Loren Fish, a supervisor of animal care at Sea World.

The story begins more than a decade ago, when the first California sea lion discovered silvery steelhead lined up at the locks, waiting to shoot up the fish ladder to freshwater. As the number of fish diminished, and the number of diners swelled, the worst sea lion offenders were put on a federal “lethal removal” list.

Sea World administrators read an article about the list and offered to take in the targeted animals. The decision was easy, said Pearson.

“We’re animal people here,” he said. “We would much rather see an animal live than dead.”

But some animal-welfare advocates equated the move to a sentence of “life in prison.”

“I don’t think permanent captivity was the solution to this problem,” said Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist for the Humane Society of the United States. “It wasn’t in the best interest of Hondo, Bob and Frank.”

On May 29, Nos. 17, 45 and 225, all animals with long rap sheets at Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife headquarters, were packed in 9-foot-long containers and shipped east on a cargo jet.

It was a long, strange trip, but not their first.

All three Bad Boys had, at one time or another, been trucked from Seattle back to their native grounds off the California coast by state and federal agents hoping to see the last of them. All three reappeared at the Ballard Locks within months.

After a 30-day quarantine at their new Florida digs, the three massive bachelor bulls were confined in the Pacific Point pool on the Fourth of July - Independence Day in the rest of the country.

“They walked out into the grotto, and all the girls in the pool swam out to check them out,” said Fish. “They sniffed them all over.”

After an initial run-in with a 150-pound South American fur seal, an aged female who chased the baffled bullies around the pool, the Bad Boys soon took over, dividing up territory between them and defending it by barking, chest-butting, shoving and, occasionally, biting.

Big and nasty, with bulked-up chests and a prominent bump on their foreheads called a sagittal crest, the sleek, sexy Seattle boys proved irresistible to resident females who knew a good man when they smelled one.

Cavorting girls rolled seductively in front of them, sometimes climbing all over them, said caretakers.

Longtime bachelors Frank and Bob willingly obliged.

Whether Hondo joined the mating game is in question. An autopsy on the 1,000-pounder, who died in captivity of a systemic infection a few months after he arrived, revealed he had low testosterone levels and undersized gonads.

“The chances he bred are slim,” said Pearson.

Handlers say they were shocked by the death in the pool.

“A sensitive guy for the ‘90s,” caretakers jokingly call the immense animal, easily more than 800 pounds.

Frank can down up to 45 pounds of seafood a day. Keepers feed him frozen herring, squid, mackerel and sardines. Tourists supplement the diet by tossing the animals smelt - sold at stands at two for $2 and often snatched out of unsuspecting hands by opportunistic egrets who fly in from the wild.

Steelhead is not on the menu.

But right now, Big Frank could care less.

He’s not a bit hungry. He has other things on his mind.

Sea lion mothers give birth in June. They go into estrus a month later. That means Frank, head bull, has his work cut out for him.

It’s another summer of hot love under the Florida sun, with no assists from Bob or Hondo.

“Ork-Ork-Ork,” the big boss booms after butting a bull away from one of the bronzed girls.

Across the pool a pup, clued into The Big Guy’s tricks, proudly sticks out his chest and cranes his neck. He’s making himself bigger, tougher, nastier - like Dad.

“Irk-irk-irk,” the pup barks.

Mom, lazing on the concrete rocks, doesn’t even notice.

The pup tries again, this time a little louder, his head a little higher.

“IRK! IRK! IRK!” he trumpets, in a call of the almost-wild.