A new Polar Biology paper by Louise Chilvers that uses technique known as Population Viabliity Analysis (PVA)  to tease apart the impacts of disease outbreaks and fishing effort on the sea lion population.  The main conclusions are that disease outbreaks suppress population growth, but do not cause the observed population decline, whereas past levels of fishing effort explain the population decline well.

Click link below  to read the full paper:
Chilvers 2012 PVA sea lions