Is this any way to save a species?

Abstract

A hardy creature of Alaska’s forbidding Aleutian Islands, the mighty Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus) survives where few other mammals can. In freezing temperatures and battered by Arctic storms, bulls of the species can reach 1,000 kilograms. But a scientific initiative to determine why the Aleutian population of Stellers has plunged over the past three decades is making them a wilderness legend for another reason. For some biologists, the Steller has become a symbol of how not to conduct complex ecosystems research. “The dollars were directed toward dealing with a political conflict,” claims Larry Crowder, a population ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.