Marine experts spent weeks searching Cowichan Bay, British Columbia, for a female Steller sea lion caught in a tight orange rope around her neck. The animal weighed 330 pounds and had a deep wound from the rope wrapped four times. On December 8, as the sun was setting, a call came that she was spotted on a dock. The rescue team quickly relaunched their boats. Martin Haulena, executive director of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society, said, "Launching the dart is the easiest part of the whole operation. It’s everything that happens after that, that you just have no control over." The Steller sea lion, also called a northern sea lion, is the largest of its kind. It lives in areas from Northern California to Russia and Japan. The Cowichan Tribes Marine Monitoring Team helped by alerting the rescuers when the sea lion appeared. They named her Stl’eluqum, meaning "fierce" or "exceptional" in the Hul’q’umi’num’ language. After sedating her with a dart gun, she jumped into the brown, debris-filled water stirred by recent rains. The team used a drone to locate her. The rope had dug deep under her skin, making it hard for her to eat. "You couldn’t see it because it was way dug in underneath the skin and blubber of the animal," explained Haulena. After careful work to remove the rope, the team tagged her flipper, gave her antibiotics, and released her back into the wild. This rescue could not have succeeded without the combined efforts of the Vancouver Aquarium team and the Cowichan Tribes. The call from the tribes led the team right to Stl’eluqum just in time to save her life.