sealionsmall1A sea lion pup had to be rescued by Californian police afte waddling out to the central reservation of the busy Interstate 880 highway in Oakland.

“We pulled up, opened the door and he just hopped straight in,” a highway patrol officer told CBS.

The whiskered hitch-hiker, named Fruitvale, was then collected from police by sea life experts from the Marine Mammal Center in nearby Sausalito.

The creature, believed to be around one year old, is “very active and alert” but slightly malnourished, center spokesman Jim Oswald said. Center staff are not sure whether the animal is male or female.

The center is coming to the rescue of growing numbers of sea lions on Californian beaches, apparently because changing ocean conditions are depleting their food supplies. Last year the center rescued 486 sea lions out of around 800 animals in total.

In a similar incident last month, a male sea lion pup died soon after being discovered malnourished at the side of a road in Richmond, Virginia.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Cute, Mammals, Ocean, Wild, babies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.