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The story this morning. good morning, brandi. reporter: good morning, john, diana. these images just break your heart. every day more baby sea lions are turning up lost and hungry as rescue crews work nonstop to save them. come on, buddy, here we go. reporter: starving and skinny, hundreds of sea lion pups continue to wash up on southern california beaches. desperately searching any where for food. i didn t know what to do. reporter: including the back seat of mike bellahunt s car. jumping in the car. hung out in the front. for a little bit. then went in the back, and he s just been sitting there for about 20 minutes. reporter: a sea world rescue crew in san diego saved the malnourished 8-month-old wednesday, something they have been doing constantly this year at beach homes and even hotels. this year it has been alarmingly high number of rescues. reporter: peter wollerstein normally rescues 200 sea lions a year. he surpassed the number in just the first three months ....
Friends of mine said there is no bait in the water. as they separate they re looking for food. reporter: from santa barbara to san diego, nearly 1,000 pups have been reported stranded forcing federal wildlife officials to declare this an unusual mortality event for the california sea lion. put some weight on him too before we return him. reporter: as they continue to investigate why this is happening, marine mammal sanctuaries are filling up with thin, dehydrated pups. in fact, there are so many sea lion pups, wildlife officials say they have to focus on those needing the most care first, and they expect this problem to continue through spring. john and diana. sad looking at the pictures. 400 of these pups have turned up in los angeles county since the beginning of this year. 36 in the same stretch in all of last year. numbers are incredible. los angeles county, 214. reported stranded in san diego county. 189 in orange county. ....
So they can really kind of be the tip of the iceberg to tell us what s actually going on in the water. reporter: rescuers on a race to answer this mystery before more sea lions end up like this. you talked about the elevated number of sea lion pups being rescued. how many more are we talking about? reporter: we are talking about exponentially high. if you think about this as a hospital, this is like the intensive care unit of this particular hospital. normally, they only have ten in the entire building. but take a look inside here. there are 25 baby sea lions, all of these sea lions, they are all sick. they should be up, they should be playing, they should be making a lot of noise. the reason they re laying there is because they are sick. they pulled off the beach, half the weight that they should be and this to the people who are trying to rescue them, this is incredibly sad. they say they are seeing ten times the numbers that they normally see here, anderson. that is so sad. ....
So they can really kind of be the tip of the iceberg to tell us what s actually going on in the water. reporter: rescuers on a race to answer this mystery before more sea lions end up like this. you talked about the elevated number of sea lion pups being rescued. how many more are we talking about? reporter: we are talking about exponentially high. if you think about this as a hospital, this is like the intensive care unit of this particular hospital. normally, they only have ten in the entire building. but take a look inside here. there are 25 baby sea lions, all of these sea lions, they are all sick. they should be up, they should be playing, they should be making a lot of noise. the reason they re laying there is because they are sick. they pulled off the beach, half the weight that they should be and this to the people who are trying to rescue them, this is incredibly sad. they say they are seeing ten times the numbers that they normally see here, anderson. that is so sad. ....
For this year are so elevated. the main theory currently is environmental factors. reporter: noaa believes it s a lack of food forcing sea lion mothers to wean early but they don t know why the food is disappearing. a lot of times they also do lead us back to things that are happening in the ocean that maybe we aren t seeing, or we aren t looking at. so they can really kind of be the tip of the iceberg to tell us what s actually going on in the water. reporter: rescuers on a race to answer this mystery before more sea lions end up like this. you talked about the elevated number of sea lion pups being rescued. how many more are we talking about? reporter: we are talking about exponentially high. if you think about this as a hospital, this is like the intensive care unit of this particular hospital. normally, they only have ten in the entire building. but take a look inside here. there are 25 baby sea lions, all of these sea lions, they are all sick. they should be up, they sho ....