Swimming with sea lions off Peru
Just six nautical miles off Peru’s largest port, Callao, more than 7000 sea lions pack the Palomino Islands, two small rocky outcroppings west of Lima, where the animals swim among visitors who dare to dive in the cold Pacific waters.
Already accustomed to the presence of tourists and sailors, hundreds of sea lions swim playfully around visitors and, sometimes, allow themselves to be touched, jumping around or slapping their flippers on the water to splash the human intruders.
“This is one of Peru’s largest sea lion colonies,” says Mariano Valverde, the director of the national islands, islets and guanera points agency.
The Palomino Islands are among the 25 protected areas in this reserve since 2009, but now they are coming into focus as a nature tourism destination around Peru’s capital.
Sea lions share the outcroppings with a large variety of marine life and birds, including a tiny colony of 25 Humboldt penguins, and this year the National Service for Protected Natural Areas, or Sernanp, stepped in to regulate and promote a tourism route that combines nature and history.
Sea lions thrive around a lighthouse and a derelict pier – ruins from the guano boom of the 19th century – the marine mammals reconquered, but the area’s wildlife faces some threats.
In recent years, as unregulated tourism and private visits increased, hungry sea lions took to feeding from the catch in fishing nets, and fishermen “declared war on the sea lions, killing them with clubs, bullets and dynamite”, Valverde says.
Birds in the reserve also face the threat of poachers, “who come to the islands and kill them either to eat them or to sell them”, the natural resources official says.
“We are now working with fishermen and tourism operators so that everyone becomes aware that we need to preserve this site,” Valverde says, adding the Sernanp has provided five companies taking tourists to the islets with protocols for ecosystem protection.
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