Staff members at The Marine Room, a high-end restaurant in La Jolla, Calif., were greeted with a surprise Thursday morning when they went to work and found a sea lion sleeping in one of the restaurant's booths.
"I got to tell you when you see a little pup like this, it touches your heart. It's such a cute little thing. It looked good to me. It was alert. Then they gave me the news, very much underweight. Ouch. I guess they need to be nice and chubby," said Bernard Guillas, the Marine Room's executive chef, according to Fox News.
SeaWorld San Diego was called to rescue the pup. "When we arrived on site, there was a back door that had been open and there's a ramp that leads from the back of the restaurant to the beach. That's how we suspect the pup got in," SeaWorld San Diego Rescue Team member Jody Westberg said, ABC News reported.
The pup was underweight, only weighing 20 pounds when it should already be at 40 to 50 pounds. It was most likely hungry and looking for food and shelter when it decided to sneak into the restaurant. Thankfully, SeaWorld is confident that they can take good care of the sea lion, bring it back to a healthy state and return it to the wild.
This pup is just one of the many victims of sea lion "strandings" in the area. Such incidents have increased in the past years due to warmer weathers that cause food to be difficult to catch because fishes migrate to farther, colder regions. The scarcity hinders the growth of the pups and causes more seals to be washed up on islands - hungry, stranded and confused - while their mothers leave them behind to try and search for food, only to come back with just too little food or no food at all, according to CNN.
