When they received the call for a sea lion trapped in a net, Keith Chandler and Tiffany Boothe scrambled to brainstorm how to safely free a trapped animal weighing upward of 200 pounds. During the car ride to the scene, they strategized.

“We geared up everything we could think of to help us corral this thing,” Chandler said.

But their patient wasn’t at all what they expected. The animal at the beach was a fur seal, not a sea lion, and it was no colossus — it was a baby. They cut away the netting and the fur seal swam away.

“We get up there, it’s about the size of a dachshund, maybe a little bigger — it’s just a little guy! So it was really easy to deal with it,” Chandler said. “That was gratifying to know that, right then, he wouldn’t have lived if we hadn’t have done that.”

Between 2001 and 2009, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries recorded 588 cetacean strandings in the Northwest. Cetaceans are whales, dolphins and porpoises. In that region during the same period, 5,193 pinnipeds — seals, sea lions and walruses — were also stranded.

Chandler, manager of the Seaside Aquarium, is the eyes and ears of the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network on the North Coast. He works in conjunction with Deborah Duffield, a professor of biology at Portland State University who heads up the network in their territory, which stretches from Tillamook to the Long Beach, Wash., Peninsula and along the Columbia River to just upriver from Portland. Boothe, administrative assistant at the Seaside Aquarium, volunteers for the network as well. Most often, they deal with pinnipeds.

The stranding network is a collaboration between volunteers who study marine mammal stranding events, report relevant findings to a national database, protect stranded marine mammals from harassment, assist live animals caught in debris or fishing gear and conduct educational outreach about marine mammals.

Marine mammals are federally protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, so individuals must be certified to handle live or dead animals.

Most of the time, they aren’t directly involved in rescues like the young fur seal’s liberation. The bread and butter of their work involves necropsies to gather data and public outreach to protect stranded animals.

One of the smelliest jobs Chandler has come up against was a dead fin whale that wound up in Portland.

“Dr. Duffield called me and asked me how I got things done because no one up there was cooperating, so I foolishly told her that if it was here, I could deal with it because I know all these people here that can help me,” Chandler said. “She got an ocean-going tugboat and towed it down here. Then I had to deal with it.”

How does a 40-foot fin whale wind up so far upriver?

“It had been caught on the bow of a car hauler,” Chandler said. “The ship hit this whale out in the ocean — and the whale had been dead a long time before that, it just got wedged under there — so it went all the way up the Columbia, pushing this whale, and as soon as the ship stopped the forward momentum stopped and the whale popped up.”

Another whale caused a stir when Chandler and volunteers transported a dead orca to Fort Stevens State Park for a necropsy.

“I’ve never seen so many rubbernecking people,” Chandler said.

But when the truck driver hauling the whale stopped for a bathroom break in Warrenton, it really got some attention.

“All these people come running out of Buoy 9, Is it Willy? Are you going to free him? Is he alive?’ It’s hilarious,” Chandler said. “Those are moments you don’t forget.”

Many of the calls Chandler receives pertain to live animals on the beach. He emphasizes keeping people away from animals so that the animals have a chance to recover or letting nature take its course.

“I’m not a big believer in rehab,” Chandler said. “I think Darwin is right. Survival of the fittest.”

There is a misconception that marine mammals like seals and sea lions don’t belong on land and must be sick or injured if they’re out of the water, Chandler said. These animals actually may use the shore to rest, molt or recover from injury or illness.

“We had a problem where people would see seal pups on the beach and they would actually bring them into us,” Boothe said. “Like ‘save it!’ and it was like ‘Oh, actually, you need to put it back right where it was.’”

The harbor seal pups sometimes wait on land for their mothers to return and collect them. The pups are dependent on their mothers for about a month. The mother seal must perceive the area as safe before returning, so people and domestic animals have to stay away.

“We don’t have those problems anymore. Very rarely do we have someone bring a seal in, just because everybody’s more aware,” Chandler said. “And they’re all well-meaning people that do these things they shouldn’t do because they want to help the animal. And then once they’re aware that that’s the process the animal goes through … the best thing you can do is leave them alone, they actually tell other people, so it works.”

They post signs around pinnipeds warning humans, and their pets, to stay away and leave the animals undisturbed. Marine mammals can also transmit some diseases, like leptospirosis, a bacterial disease that can cause kidney failure, to humans and domestic animals. So staying at least 50 feet away is safer for the marine mammals and their terrestrial counterparts.

After receiving reports of stranded animals, Chandler must make a determination on how to respond. If the animal is sick or injured, he has to make a choice of whether to euthanize the animal or wait and see if the animal will recover. Usually, they wait.

“People get — sometimes get — upset with us for not putting animals down, too,” Boothe said. “We don’t because you can’t know whether or not an animal’s going to make it, and that’s not really our call to make. There are so many animals that I’ve seen that I’m like, ‘that animal’s going to be dead the next day, he’s horrible.’ And then they’ll leave the beach and we don’t see them again.”

There are no rehabilitation centers for marine mammals in the Northwest.

“I’ve seen animals come back from amazing things,” Chandler said. That includes shark bites and bouts of disease.

One group, the elephant seals, can appear to be in the process of dying while periodically undergoing a natural process called “catastrophic molt,” replacing their old skin and hair. Chandler said there have been instances of these animals being unnecessarily euthanized during the process because they seemed to be in so much pain.

“The process of molting that they go through is horrible,” Chandler said. Horrible, and natural. “They smell, they stink.”

But sometimes, the animals really are in trouble and do not recover.

“We had a live whale wash ashore, right out in front of the Turnaround during the last phase of the volleyball tournament, and it was hot, and so you had just tons of people on the beach and you had this live beaked whale thrashing in the surf,” Boothe said. “But the beaked whale was already dying, like he was coming in because he was dying, so he was doing all these death throes and thrashes, and then you had a hundred to 200 people in the water with this animal trying to push it back in.”

“It was amazing that anybody didn’t get killed,” Chandler said.

Getting people out of the water and out of danger was a priority. There was nothing that could be done for the whale.

It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever smelled on the job, but Chandler still tried to stand upwind of a decaying Steller sea lion corpse while Boothe and Duffield’s research assistant, Dalin D’Alessandro, got wrist-deep in the animal’s body cavity.

Steller sea lions are listed as endangered in their western population, but not their eastern population, which enjoys a range from southeast Alaska to Northern California. Two pickup trucks flanked the necropsy site on the Seaside beach, just above the tide line with a few hours to go until the water reached them. An occasional beachgoer passed by — mostly upwind and away from the eau de dead sea lion.

Chandler is not a big fan of necropsies himself. He stood by offering assistance at arm’s length and documented the work with a digital camera.

Much of the body had been heavily decomposed. By the barnacles that had begun to grow on the corpse and the level of decay, D’Alessandro estimated the sea lion had been dead between three weeks and a month before washing ashore.

Boothe and D’Alessandro did what they could to determine the subadult male sea lion’s fate at the scene. Their hands gloved, the two women searched for parasites, tumors and hemorrhages. The intestines seemed twisted — a sign of trauma.

Most of the tissues were too far gone to collect, but they did manage to get a stool sample and the sea lion’s stomach.

After the beach necropsies, D’Alessandro must make the return drive to Portland.

“Usually on the drive home you’re catching those random whiffs,” she said. The contents of her pickup truck bed appear innocuous, squirreled away in coolers or wrapped in plastic bags. No hints to fellow drivers that science has hit the road.

“Until they’re like, ‘What’s that smell?’” D’Alessandro said.

What happens to the carcass depends on the locality. Some places like them taken out of the way or buried, while others leave the animal where it washed up. Chandler and Boothe personally like leaving the dead animals out where they can be recycled back into the food chain.

“There are a lot of eagles out here that help clean these animals up,” Chandler said.

At Portland State University, Duffield and her team process information from the necropsies.

“Every animal has a different story to tell,” she said.

Duffield specializes in genetics of marine mammals and teaches classes on marine mammals at PSU. Coordinating with the stranding network is an extension of her own interest.

“We’re trying really hard to track potential diseases that can be transmitted to domestic animals or to humans,” she said. She estimates they handle between 140 and 190 cases annually. This year has been busy.

The university is responsible for the necropsies. They collect all they can from the animals; in some cases, they bring the whole animal back to Portland. They look for bullets, pellets and other things that can give clues as to how the animals died. Often, they save the skeletons to evaluate what kind of bones show damage.

The bones are also used in university museum exhibits and student instruction.

With her finger to the pulse of marine mammal strandings, Duffield has noticed a high incidence of sea lion shootings in the region.

“One of our real problems is people don’t shoot them nicely,” she said. “We see animals that are gut shot, their intestines all twisted.”

Shooting the animals is illegal, Duffield said, but if people are going to do it, they should at least be kind.

Fishermen and some conservationists have complained that sea lions are competing for salmon. But a lot of the animals Duffield sees do not even have salmon in their stomachs, she said.

“It just makes me really mad,” she said.