Population Ecology and Conservation Status of the South American Sea Lion in Uruguay

South American sea lion (Otaria flavescens, SASL) is distributed along the South American coast from southern Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean to northern Peru in the Pacific Ocean (Vaz-Ferreira 1982, Rosas et al. 1994). Throughout its entire geographical range, the SASL history of abundance has been tightly associated to human activities such as intense sealing from the 1950s until recent days (Crovetto et al. 1979, Crespo and Pedraza 1991, Sielfeld 1999, Ponce de León 2000). The post-harvesting dynamics of local SASL populations in the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean has shown a remarkable

1 Departamento de Ecología y Evolución, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay.