The legal battles appear to be over and sea otters will be allowed to enter the “otter-free zone” as they wish. Not that anyone had been stopping them anyway.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service was obligated to remove sea otters that had relocated below Point Conception.
It was part of a supposedly binding agreement with commercial shellfish harvesters who were giving up substantial business resources that sea otters would eat at San Nicholas Island where the government relocated sea otters to colonize that island’s waters.
The reality was that sea otters didn’t do well at San Nicholas Island and the population dwindled.
Once the government decided the relocation project was not a success, they backed out on their obligation to shellfish harvesters and abandoned all efforts to relocate southward-traveling sea otters from below Point Conception to their waters back up north.
I read that at least one NGO reported this legal turn of events as a positive outcome, citing healthier kelp forests and more finfish.
From my perspective, as someone who works at sea and has a lifetime of interacting with the food chain out there, the reality looks much different.
Yes, sea otters will eat urchins, which eat kelp; and yes, more kelp can benefit certain finfish populations, but there are overlooked factors that turn this scenario negative because of damages.
Sea otters are destructive and devastate entire populations of shellfish in areas where they feed. They take them all — big and small.
I’ve seen video of a pipeline before sea otters moved in and it was full of life, with various healthy shellfish throughout their stages of life. The video taken after sea otters moved in looked like it was taken after the big bomb went off.
The voracious otters killed the baby shellfish as well as the adults. The scene looked like a lifeless wasteland with shattered shells littered everywhere.
Sea otters are known to eat amazing quantities of food each day. They work over an area until shellfish are nearly gone, then they move just far enough away to find more shellfish to plunder.
Besides being harmful to sea life, the urchins cost our shellfish harvesters income, increase their costs and professional dangers because they have to travel farther to find sufficient quantities of healthy shellfish.
There is another victim of sea otterr: Our collective wallet. With shellfish harvesters having to travel farther, their costs go up, so when we buy shellfish, the price goes up.
Sea otters are cute, I’ll grant them that.
In our modern day of managing wildlife by the cute factor — instead of carefully looking at the entire food chain — I’m not surprised the cute critters get their way, but other forms of sealife have to die in order to feed them.
I’m doubtful that allowing sea otters to expand is a wise decision on the part of wildlife managers.
— Capt. David Bacon operates WaveWalker Charters and is president of SOFTIN Inc., a nonprofit organization providing seafaring opportunities for those in need. Visit softininc.blogspot.com to learn more about the organization and how you can help. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
