A very large sea lion is drawing onlookers to a pier popular among both other sea lions and tourists in San Francisco, wowing visitors and catapulting him to online fame.
“POV: You pull up to the gym and see that one guy who’s just built different,” reads the caption on one video of the sea lion. Commenters across several Reddit threads dedicated to the mammal call him an “AbsoluteUnit,” “Harbor Master” and “Sir Chungus Maximus.”
But the name that has stuck is Chonkers — because, well, he is chonky.
Video posted on social media last month showed the sea lion leaping from the bay onto a pontoon full of smaller sea lions, who immediately scattered to make way. Chonkers, about two to three times as large, weighs about 1,500 to 2,000 pounds, according to experts. He has a light-tan coat and a boxy, bearlike head.
He is not a freak of nature. He is a Steller sea lion.
His species, unlike the California sea lions most typically found around San Francisco, rarely shows up at Pier 39 — a popular tourist spot near one end of Fisherman’s Wharf. There, thousands of the less sizable animals laze atop wooden floats installed for their rest.
Steller sea lions typically migrate farther offshore, said Laura Gill, the public programs manager at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, which has been tracking Chonkers since March 13. She and other experts believe Chonkers most likely swam about 30 miles from a rookery in the Farallon Islands, making his way under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay.
The bay’s waters are more shallow than the open sea, Ms. Gill said, where sea lions can avoid predators and more easily track prey like anchovies and rockfish. The floating platforms, she added, are a comfortable alternative to the harsh ocean, where, in order to rest, a sea lion may have to haul itself onto jagged rocks.
“They can just rest on those platforms for hours, days at a time,” she added, “and not have to worry about the elements.” Though life is great at the dock, the journey there is long, which may deter other Steller sea lions, Ms. Gill said.
Steller sea lions are similar in appearance to California sea lions, but they grow much larger. Males can be up to 11 feet long and weigh up to about 2,500 pounds.
They usually forage at night, feasting on more than a hundred species of fish and cephalopods. But individual sea lions may adopt their own hunting strategies, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“He’s kind of out of the ordinary,” Ms. Gill said of Chonkers. “He is probably just very food-motivated.”
On the Farallon Islands, Steller sea lions and their smaller counterparts, the California sea lion, compete intensely for food, Ms. Gill said.
“Chonkers is kind of just working smarter and not harder,” she added, “trying to find the easy, safe place where there’s less competition, less predators.” At Pier 39, Ms. Gill said, Chonkers is “king of the dock.”
Sheila Chandor, who has been harbor master at Pier 39 since 1985, said Chonkers had been visiting the pier for about 15 years, but had previously stayed just a day or two at a time.
“It was quite a spectacle to see this wonderful mammal,” Ms. Chandor recalled of the first time she saw him. This time, Ms. Chandor added, Chonkers had stayed far longer and appeared to have been joined by a juvenile Steller sea lion for a few days.
“I sort of hope we don’t end up with more,” Ms. Chandor said, noting that the wooden floats were built for California sea lions, which weigh up to about 700 pounds. (As it is, there is hardly enough space for all the animals, which regularly pile upon and push one another off the floats.)
“When he’s sitting on the dock, he’s so big compared to the others,” Ms. Chandor said. “He makes them all look like little kittens.”
“He’s such a big guy,” she marveled. “He’s truly huge.”
Ms. Chandor described international tourists, locals and other visitors coalescing at the pier on Wednesday morning in the hopes of witnessing the great beast.
“They didn’t know each other, but they were all saying, ‘Are you here to see Chonkers?’” she said.
Livia Albeck-Ripka is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering breaking news, California and other subjects.
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