Otago pakake colony births 38 pups in a season — first crossing of the breeding-colony threshold in 150 years

For the first time in more than a century, the Otago pakake colony has broken through the 35-pup mark in a single breeding season, with 38 New Zealand sea lion pups born in the past few months and almost all of them descended from a single founding female.

The Department of Conservation announced the milestone on Wednesday, calling it the strongest evidence yet that the country’s rarest sea lion is re-establishing itself on the mainland after being hunted to functional extinction by the early 1900s. The 38 pups, born to a population of roughly 50 breeding females spread along the Otago coast, take the colony onto the official ledger for the first time in the 150 years since the species largely disappeared from mainland shores.

To be formally recognised as a breeding colony rather than a re-colonisation in progress, pakake at Otago need to deliver at least 35 pups in five consecutive seasons. Wednesday’s count puts them on the board for the first year. Four more breeding seasons at the same level will lock it in.

DOC Coastal Otago Biodiversity Ranger Moss Thompson said the moment had been a long time coming. “This is an incredible success story reflecting work by mana whenua, conservationists, and the Otago community,” he said. The quiet hero of the story, he added, was a single sea lion known to staff as Mum. “Almost every Otago pakake can be traced back to Mum,” he said. “From that first pup to roughly 50 breeding females with 38 pups in one season, it’s huge.”

Mum arrived on the Otago coast in the early 1990s and in 1993 gave birth to the first New Zealand sea lion pup recorded on the mainland in more than 150 years. She went on to have 11 pups before she died in 2010. Of the 38 newborns counted this season, 36 are her direct descendants. Just over half are female, the demographic that matters most for the long-term recovery of the colony.

Te Rūnaka o Ōtākou chief executive Nadia Wesley-Smith said the milestone belonged to a much wider effort. “This represents significant mahi from dedicated whānau and our wider Ōtepoti community,” she said. Local rūnaka have been central to mapping nesting sites, signposting them for the public and helping protect mothers and pups during their first vulnerable weeks ashore.

NZ Sea Lion Trust chair Shaun McConkey, who has watched the colony grow season by season, told RNZ the result followed a difficult previous year. “Last season there was a bit of a drop in numbers, a lot of our females didn’t have pups,” he said. He has also noticed females from the Rakiura colony, established in 2019, beginning to drift north and join the Otago group, a sign the recovery is now wider than a single beach. “As numbers increase, we need ways to share coastlines with these large, charismatic taoka,” he said.

Pakake are among the rarest sea lions in the world. Before human contact they ranged across the South Island coast and into parts of the North Island, but they were hunted heavily by both Māori and, later, European whalers, who took them for their pelts and oil. By the early twentieth century only the populations in the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands and Campbell Island groups remained, and even those have been under pressure. The reappearance of breeding animals on the Otago coast and at Rakiura in the past three decades has been the most encouraging shift in the species’ fortunes since the hunting stopped.

The success is not without complication. Adult pakake are large, social and curious, and the spots they prefer for hauling out and creching their pups are often the same beaches that walkers, dog owners and surfers use. DOC staff and the Sea Lion Trust have spent the last decade quietly closing some tracks during the breeding season, asking people to keep dogs on lead near the dunes and putting up signs at known nursery beaches around Dunedin. The shallow, sheltered creches the pups need in order to learn to swim are also the kind of bays that fill up with summer visitors.

The other variable is climate. Warmer seas and changing fish stocks affect what the mothers can hunt while their pups are still on the beach, and a poor feeding year shows up immediately in pup survival. The drop McConkey described last season is the kind of dip the colony needs to ride out four more times in a row to clinch official status. DOC said it would continue annual pup counts and tagging alongside the rūnaka and the trust, with surveys building a clearer picture of how far north the recovery is now spreading.

The full DOC media release was issued on Wednesday morning, alongside coverage by the Otago Daily Times noting the colony had been on the cusp of the threshold for several years before crossing it.

For now the news is straightforward. The Otago colony, built almost entirely from one returning female and the people who decided to give her descendants room to grow, has crossed a threshold no one alive had previously seen. It is the first official mark on a five-year ledger that, if it holds, will return New Zealand sea lions to the recognised mainland breeding map for the first time in a century and a half.

Have you seen pakake on a Dunedin beach this summer, or watched DOC tag a new pup? Tell us in the comments below.