Sea otters are terminally cute critters and a delight to view rolling and diving within the kelp cover of Monterey Bay, the place some 3,000 endangered southern otters play an important position in sustaining the marine kelp forest. However to crabs, clams, abalone, urchins and a few fishermen, sea otters are voracious marine weasels that may eat 25% of their physique weight a day — a perceived menace to life and livelihood.
That’s why some vigorous debates have been launched at 16 open homes placed on by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service final yr to get public enter on, as the invitation put it, the “potential reintroduction of sea otters to their historic vary,” together with Oregon and Northern California, a choice that’s anticipated to be made this yr.
In 2020, the service was directed by Congress to check the feasibility and value of otter repopulation partially due to concern that an oil spill or different incident may wipe out the group concentrated round Monterey Bay. In September 2023, U.S. Fish and Wildlife rejected a fishing business petition to take away otters’ threatened standing underneath the Endangered Species Act as a result of the California inhabitants has did not develop considerably in current many years.
There was an added incentive to maintain the safety in place: the continued marine havoc linked to local weather change. An algal bloom off the Central California coast killed tons of of sea lions and dolphins final summer time, a number of “crimson tides” have invaded San Francisco Bay and almost 95% of Northern California’s kelp forest has been decimated by small purple sea urchins whose main predator (with the ocean otter out of the image) — the sunflower sea star, or starfish — has largely died off from a losing illness induced or exacerbated by warming ocean temperatures.
As soon as upon a time, huge rafts of tons of of hundreds of sea otters crammed the coastal waters of the north Pacific Rim, from Baja to Japan, till they have been pushed to close extinction by Captain Cook dinner and different 18th and nineteenth century British, Russian and American fur-trade hunters, who killed “sea beavers” to provide the Chinese language imperial court docket with luxurious otter fur. Remnant populations have been protected beginning in 1911. In California within the early Sixties, survivors from round Large Sur recolonized Monterey Bay, feasting on urchins that eat kelp and revitalizing the kelp forest. A small group has even migrated south near Santa Barbara.
Now environmentalists in Oregon and California, and several other Indigenous teams, together with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians in Sonoma County, are mobilizing in assist of an try to revive otters the place they’ve lengthy been absent, together with San Francisco Bay. Fishermen usually are not so sanguine.
On the Bodega Bay open home, an abalone diver, Doug Jung, summarized fishermen’s worries succinctly: Wouldn’t reintroduced otters “strip mine the ocean”?
Dick Ogg, a longtime fisherman, was extra particular. “The potential for impression,” he mentioned, “can’t be quantified. In the event that they eat the juvenile crab, that might be an enormous deal. Dungeness crab is our No. 1 fishery.”
There was no California salmon season in 2023 due to the lengthy drought that preceded final winter’s torrential rains, and the 2024 season continues to be in query. As for leisure abalone diving on the North Coast, it’s been shut down because the kelp forest collapsed (industrial abalone diving was banned way back). Issues are precarious throughout for West Coast industrial fishermen, who fear about sustaining their working waterfronts.
“I nonetheless assume nature will do its personal work,” Ogg instructed the Fish and Wildlife representatives in Bodega Bay. “I wouldn’t be bothered if [otters] recolonized on their very own.”
However pure repopulation from the Golden Gate north isn’t doubtless. With the decline of protecting coastal kelp and a now-healthy inhabitants of white sharks within the area’s waters, migrating otters stand likelihood of turning into nice white snack meals. However with human help, the reintroduction of otters may bypass the gauntlet.
If the trouble succeeded, the impression on fishing won’t be what’s feared.
A 2020 examine within the journal Science discovered that Canada’s reintroduction of sea otters in British Columbia not solely generated $42 million from otter-loving vacationers but additionally added $9 million to the industrial fishery due to its restoration of kelp habitat for lingcod and different species. Alaska, the place launched sea otters helped repopulate the coastal waters within the Sixties, now has each the biggest variety of otters and the most efficient industrial fishery within the U.S.
“The ocean otter may very effectively be the salvation for … catching fish within the years forward if we will rebuild and restore a wholesome ecosystem,” suggests Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), whose congressional district consists of the whole coast north of San Francisco.
In Oregon and Northern California, there’s hope that the cascading imbalances human have induced — exterminated otters, sick sea stars, disappearing abalone — can start to be set straight, and that the kelp forest habitat, wealthy in marine life and a buffer towards torrential storms, can recuperate.
And sure, we have to restore many extra creatures in lots of extra habitats and ecosystems. Possibly an lovable marine weasel can encourage that, too.
David Helvarg is govt director of Blue Frontier, an ocean coverage group, and co-host of “Rising Tide: The Ocean Podcast.”
