A pair of aggressive sea lions appeared to chase away people at a crowded beach in San Diego, California. Charlianne Yeyna captured the moment in a video that quickly went viral on TikTok, amassing nearly ten million views in two days.
"The sea lions were sleeping and were just massive on the beach, and I was just watching them, and this woman got really close to them, like 4 feet away, and was trying to take a photo of it up close, and it just woke up and started chasing everybody," Yeyna told KNSD.
The two sea lions charged toward the crowd, causing everybody to scatter away from the marine mammals.
"I started recording because it was really funny to watch for me to see all these tourists getting blown away by these giant sea lions," she said.
Robyn Davidoff with the Sierra Club Seal Society saw the viral video and told KGTV that the two sea lions were not trying to chase away the crowd of people. Instead, the two young males were engaged in a battle for dominance.
"So what they do is they chase each other off the area to establish dominance. So it's kind of like a brother or sister playing king of the mountain. And that's what they were doing," Davidoff told the news station.