Return of the Sea Otter

by Todd McLeish

  The state of California didn’t give up; government officials just changed strategies. Instead of requesting that management authority be returned to the state and obtaining a waiver on the moratorium on capturing and killing sea otters, it requested a “scientific research permit” from the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1976 that would enable it to conduct “experimental management procedures” involving the relocation of forty otters from the southern end of their range to the northern end. Knowing full well that the state’s objectives were counter to that of the legislation, the California Department of Fish and Game was still issued its research permit.

  While all this was happening, the Fish and Wildlife Service added the southern sea otter to the federal endangered species list in 1977, a step that provided an additional level of protection for the species and required a recovery plan be developed. Lilian Carswell said that the plan indicates that sea otters can be considered for removal from the endangered list if their California population reaches 3,090 animals for three consecutive years. Back in 1982, when the plan was first approved, the population had just reached 2,100 and still had a long way to go. The population finally reached the target number for the first time in 2016. Although it would likely be a controversial step to remove sea otters from the endangered list, Carswell doesn’t think it would affect the level of protection the animals receive because sea otters would continue to be managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Marine Mammal Protection Act even if they were no longer on the endangered list, and that legislation is even more protective than the Endangered Species Act.

  When sea otters were first listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, it was due to the small size of the population, its limited range, and its great risk from the increasing offshore oil development taking place nearby. That latter factor led the recovery team to conclude that relocating a number of sea otters to establish a separate population was an “effective and reasonable management action.” And the strategy that was eventually endorsed by the federal recovery team was nearly the same one the abalone fishermen had proposed nearly twenty years earlier and which the state Department of Fish and Game had long supported—the establishment of a management zone where sea otters would be excluded, possibly forever. How the otters would be kept out of the zone was, once again, never clearly addressed, and the natural inclination of sea otter males to wander great distances almost ensured the plan would fail, but the plan moved ahead nonetheless.

  The idea of zonal management of sea otters was endorsed by the Marine Mammal Commission, an advisory board established by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, in part as a means of separating what it saw as human activities in the marine environment that were incompatible with sea otters. It pointed to commercial gillnet fishing as one such activity that needed to be kept from areas where sea otters lived. About eighty sea otters per year drowned in gillnets from 1982 to 1984, and many more were rumored to have died in previous years. So the fishery’s manager, Fish and Game, established a series of regulations that pushed the gillnet fishery into zones far enough offshore that it no longer affected the otters. Since zonal management appeared to work in that case, it was argued, it should work with the incompatible abalone fishery, too.

  The relocation site that was selected was San Nicolas Island, the most remote of the Channel Islands, an uninhabited island located ninety-one miles southwest of Los Angeles that is controlled by the US Navy for use in weapons testing and training. It was a site that Friends of the Sea Otter had long considered a suitable place for establishing a new population of sea otters, far enough distant from the existing range that both populations would not likely be affected by a single oil spill. And because the island had an abundance of food and was located a great distance from the mainland across a deep ocean channel, many biologists believed the animals would not try to swim back to the mainland. They were wrong.

  Before the plan went forward, however, the fishermen pushed for even more concessions, as did the oil and gas industry and the US Navy. Perhaps the most challenging concession, which was codified in a federal law signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, required that any sea otter from either the coastal range or the San Nicolas Island population that strayed into the management zone designated for shellfisheries would be removed by “all feasible nonlethal means.” That stipulation would eventually be the plan’s undoing.

  Finally, in 1987, after more than a decade of haggling over the details, the plan was approved. It established what came to be known as a “no-otter zone” southward from Point Conception, a headland that is commonly used as the dividing line between central and Southern California. No sea otters were to be allowed anywhere south of that point, except in the relocation zone around San Nicolas Island. Since the southern extent of the sea otters’ range was not far from Point Conception already, those involved knew it wouldn’t be long before natural range expansion would push them into the no-otter zone. But problems emerged long before that happened.

  As biologists—and even many fishermen—had been saying for twenty-five years, it’s impossible to keep a sea otter somewhere in the marine environment that it doesn’t want to be. And that proved to be the case in California. Just as had happened in all of the experimental relocation efforts in the years prior, most of the 140 sea otters that were captured and brought to San Nicolas Island from 1987 to 1991 departed the region almost immediately or simply disappeared. “They were leaving almost as fast as they were brought there,” Carswell said. “Some juveniles stayed around a little while, so people got encouraged by that, but eventually they left, too. They just grew up a little first.” Some never even made it to the island. Carswell heard that four older males appeared to die of heart attacks from the stress of the capture and relocation process. All otters that made it to the island were tagged so they could be monitored, but many were never seen again. “Many of those probably died, but their bodies were never found, so no one knows exactly what happened,” said Carswell. “They might have slipped back into the central coast range undetected, but probably a lot of them were panicked, they didn’t know where they were, they swam off into the ocean, and they died.” The fate of only half of the animals is known. Some quickly returned to the exact place on the central coast where they were first captured. Others detoured to unexpected locations: about twenty found their way seventy-four miles north to San Miguel Island, where they may have established a new colony, but because it was located in the no-otter zone, they were captured again and removed.

  By 1993, the recovery team suspended its efforts to remove otters from the no-otter zone so it could reevaluate its methods. By then, however, because just a dozen sea otters remained at San Nicolas Island and almost no otters were wandering into the no-otter zone, learning new methods of capturing and relocating sea otters was no longer a priority. Five years later, the southward expansion of their range resulted in large numbers of sea otters entering the management zone, renewing calls by fishermen for the animals’ removal. Although the idea behind the no-otter zone was to contain the relocated population of otters to San Nicolas Island rather than to put a halt to range expansion, the management plan did not make that distinction, further infuriating the fishermen when the Fish and Wildlife Service made no effort to remove the expanding otters from the zone. In 2001, the service issued a new policy indicating that removal of otters from the no-otter zone was inconsistent with the Endangered Species Act, and no further action would be taken until the management plan was reevaluated. A new recovery plan for the southern sea otter was issued two years later and recommended that sea otters should be allowed to naturally expand their range to further the species’ recovery. And the recovery team advised that the management zone concept was a failure and should be discontinued. It took more than a decade—as well as lawsuits from both environmentalists and fishermen and more than twenty-seven thousand comments from the public—but the no-otter zone was officially declared invalid in December 2
012, and sea otters were allowed to continue their range expansion unabated.

  The fishermen remained unhappy, however, preferring a failed otter containment program to none at all, but by then their issues had changed. Commercial abalone fishing had come to an end in California in 1997, and the reasons had little to do with sea otters. Abalone had been subject to what some have described as serial depletion—after fishermen depleted the easiest-to-access and most desirable species, they moved on to the next species and then the next until there were few abalone of any variety left. That meant that the species living in the deepest water and those that were never particularly abundant were targeted last. That last species, the white abalone, which is found in water eighty to two hundred feet deep, was wiped out in just six years of fishing. By 1996 white abalone populations had declined by 99 percent, and five years later the white abalone was added to the federal endangered species list. It became the first marine invertebrate to be listed as endangered, and today the National Marine Fisheries Service considers it almost biologically extinct. Despite claims by many fishermen that sea otters were to blame, most agree that sea otters had no role in the white abalone’s decline, since its range and the range of the sea otter do not overlap.

  All that remains of the abalone fishery today is a small sport fishery north of San Francisco that requires breath-hold diving only and a daily bag limit of three red abalone. The fishermen saw the approaching end of the commercial fishery as long ago as the 1980s, and many of them switched to harvesting sea urchins. Urchins, the spiny globular creatures that some say look like underwater hedgehogs, were promoted by the National Marine Fisheries Service as an underutilized resource that was depleting kelp beds and destroying fish habitat in areas where sea otters were absent. Today it’s the urchin fishermen who are the most vocal group opposed to the range expansion of sea otters in California. Sea urchins are often considered a sea otter’s favorite food, and the hungry otters can easily outcompete the fishermen for their catch. But the sea otters’ range does not yet overlap with the urchin-fishing grounds in southern California, so there is no direct competition. Yet the fishermen are rightly worried that otters will move into their favorite fishing areas if nothing is done to stop them. So they continue to file and appeal lawsuits and introduce legislation to reinstate the no-otter zone, so far with little success.

  As more and more time passes, however, public support for sea otters continues to grow. It is driving the economy in Monterey and nearby Moss Landing, and it’s a major component of the economy in Morro Bay and many communities in between. A 2005 economic analysis claimed that the economic benefits of allowing sea otters to expand their range southward into Santa Barbara County could top $100 million annually, even when factoring in commercial fishing losses. While that report has been much criticized, anecdotal evidence suggests that there are plenty more people benefitting economically from sea otter watching than ever participated in the abalone or urchin fisheries. “You can see it clearly within the sea otter range that kayak and ecotourism companies are benefitting a lot from having sea otters there,” Carswell said.

  So while the controversy caused by the repopulation of sea otters in California isn’t entirely in the past, it’s clear that opposition is waning. In locations where otters have long become reestablished, like Monterey Bay, controversy has given way to adulation. The healthy otter populations there have made Monterey sea otters the most studied and best-understood sea otters in the world. And yet their use as wild research subjects is far from over.

  Chapter 3: Catch and Release

  MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA

  THE WATERFRONT in Monterey, California, is a bustling place, with boats of many sizes and varieties scattered among its three public wharfs, where an abundance of shopping and dining establishments mix with street performers, fishermen, and tourists. Perched on the southern edge of Monterey Bay, a two-hour drive south of San Francisco, the city is renowned for its annual jazz festival, year-round whale-watching cruises, a highly respected and well-funded aquarium, and a history made famous by novelist John Steinbeck, who grew up in nearby Salinas and whose colorful novel of the city’s waning days as the West Coast sardine-canning capital earned him a Nobel Prize. In Cannery Row, Steinbeck described the infamous street in 1930s Monterey as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkytonks, restaurants and whorehouses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”

  It has changed a great deal since then. Now a major tourist destination, it retains some of its historic cannery buildings, though they have now been turned into boutique hotels and trinket shops. The major draw for me, however, lies right behind the waterfront buildings—perhaps the most productive kelp forests in the state. That’s where Renay and I were headed to get our first hands-on encounter with sea otters.

  Coast Guard Pier, located at the entrance to Cannery Row, is home to dozens of commercial and recreational boats, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary vessels, and, of course, the Coast Guard. It’s also home to hundreds of California sea lions that line the piers and breakwater, barking and fighting and resting and making the area smell like a cesspool when the wind blows just the right way. They are usually joined by a few harbor seals and, infrequently, an elephant seal. At eight thirty on a late September morning, we met a team of ten biologists, interns, and volunteers to discuss the logistics of capturing live sea otters in the nearby waters and delivering them to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to be implanted with tracking devices. Six members of the team were designated as shore spotters, who spread out at several sites where otters were commonly observed and spent the day watching through high-powered telescopes for groups of resting otters that could potentially be captured.

  Renay and I joined otter biologist Tim Tinker and divers Joe Tomoleoni and Mike Kenner on a gray, twenty-foot Boston Whaler named Pursuit, which was loaded with dive gear, Wilson traps, and safety equipment. The traps consist of a simple net inside a circular metal frame that is pushed up from below a resting sea otter. A manual drawstring closes the net when an otter is inside. It sounds simple, but as we soon learned, it is a complex process to capture live sea otters in the wild, one that requires a great deal of waiting and watching, sneaky strategy, and plenty of luck. And at any time, a wayward kayaker, sea lion, or piece of kelp can lead to failure.

  After a very short ride—no more than a half mile from the pier to the opposite end of Cannery Row—Tinker turned off the engine and we drifted just offshore of the aquarium. The entire area is an immense kelp bed, from the harbor out and around the Monterey peninsula and extending almost a quarter mile from shore. The upper reaches of giant kelp were massed at the surface of the water everywhere, and marine life was abundant. As we looked down into the glassy water, it appeared as if we were peering down from the canopy of a liquid forest, which we sort of were. Great egrets and double-crested cormorants perched warily on some of the sturdier branches, while sea lions and seals repeatedly surfaced unexpectedly in all directions. Almost everywhere we turned, long chains of salps—tiny jellyfish-like creatures that look somewhat like clear caterpillars—were visible an arm’s reach below the surface. Occasionally we saw a school of herring or a small salmon darting by, and solitary kelp rockfish could often be seen pausing motionless for long minutes at a time, as if they thought they were well camouflaged. They weren’t.

  We pulled up to the retractable pier at the aquarium to pick up a four-foot wooden crate to hold captured otters on the boat, and then we cruised slowly a couple hundred yards toward a rocky outcrop at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. The rocks there were covered with three varieties of cormorants, brown pelicans, and a few harbor seals, but it was the sea otters just beyond the rocks that caught our attention. It’s a common ha
ngout location for otters, so as we approached the area, Tinker quietly called on the radio to the nearby spotters to determine whether any otters were resting there and could be targeted for capture. The calm voice from shore reported that three otters had been resting together for some time, so we stopped about one hundred yards from the otters and tied the boat to a handful of kelp to wait and watch. We were much closer to the otters than is typical at any other otter-trapping site in California, because the Monterey otters are used to seeing boaters and kayakers nearby and are less likely to become spooked and dive.

  As Tomoleoni and Kenner prepared to get in the water, a kayaker and paddleboarder glided near the otters, causing one of the animals to awaken and dive. It was an issue that would plague us all day. But with two otters still resting, the divers prepared their dry suits and other gear, including what they called scooters, which they use to propel themselves through the water. Looking like a small industrial fan, a scooter is held with two hands and pulls the diver smoothly through the water. The trap is attached to the front of the scooter so when the divers are about ten or fifteen feet below the otters, they can rapidly propel themselves upward to capture the otters.

  We continued to watch the otters, all of which were now wrapped in kelp and resting. The researchers don’t even attempt to capture otters that are actively grooming or foraging, because the animals will be more aware of the divers approaching, so we waited to make sure they were settled down completely. Two of the otters already had tags attached to their flippers, indicating that they had previously been captured and might be particularly wary of the boat and divers. As we waited, we sat low in the boat and whispered so as not to raise the alert level of the otters, but none of the other wildlife in the area followed our lead. A Pacific bottlenose dolphin surfaced near the otters, dived below them, and resurfaced again before disappearing. Harbor seals and cormorants appeared and disappeared as well, gulls cried out loudly, and sea lions barked in the distance, but the sea otters appeared oblivious to it all. So the divers slid overboard and waited for Tinker to hand each of them a scooter and trap. As they descended silently beneath the surface and propelled themselves away from the boat, they reminded me of the underwater chase scenes from an early James Bond movie.