Field sketch by Steller with map behind, of "sea cow", fur seal and california sea lion from 1741.

Georg Wilhelm Steller published the first scientific paper on Steller sea lions in 1751. Since then over 300 papers and articles have been written about Steller sea lions. You can learn more about what scientists have studied about Steller sea lions over the past two centuries by using our new online Steller sea lion searchable bibliography. This search tool allows you to search by year, author, or keywords to narrow the search you are doing.

Background

Andrea Hunter and Andrew Trites compiled an annotated bibliography of Steller sea lion literature in 2001 that identifies the areas of research that have been undertaken, and whether or not they address the leading hypotheses proposed to explain the population decline in Alaska. (Hunter and Trites 2001) They found 111 publications in scientific journals, and 161 other documents (e.g., technical reports, unpublished reports, dissertations, etc.). Numbers of Steller sea lion articles published per decade has risen exponentially from 4 in the 1940s to 128 in the 1990s, and continues to rise.

The bibliography published by Hunter and Trites was entered into a searchable database, and additional references and key words were added. We hope that you will find it useful to understand what is already known about sea lions, as well as to understand why they have declined in the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian Islands.

We have endeavoured to make the searchable database as accurate as possible, but recognize that there may be errors and that we may have overlooked some publications. Please write to us at consortium@zoology.ubc.ca with your corrections and insights so that we can continue to update our records.

Happy searching!

http://www.marinemammal.org/bibliography.php

5 January 2004