Sea Otter Recovery Plan Unveiled

A panel of scientists Thursday recommended allowing federally protected sea otters to roam freely down the Southern California coastline, and urged the federal government to abandon its program of relocating the voracious shellfish eaters away from waters reserved for fishermen.

The recommendations are contained in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recovery plan for the southern sea otter, whose population has remained so small that federal officials list it as threatened with extinction.

One of the biggest concerns, according to the plan that has been 14 years in the making, is that a major oil spill from tankers or offshore oil drilling could devastate the remnant population of California otters, which were nearly wiped out by 19th century fur traders.

But officials have identified additional threats, including getting snagged by fishing gear and contracting diseases from cat feces flushed into the ocean.

With the otter population barely holding steady, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed with its “recovery team” of scientific experts that rounding up otters in Southern California and relocating them to Central California is not the best way to help the otters expand their numbers.

“The problem is that otters don’t stay where you take them,” said Jim Estes, a sea otter expert with the U.S. Geological Survey and a leader of the recovery team. “All or most of them will try to go back where they came from, and a lot of them will die in the process.”

The deal was struck with fishermen in the late 1980s, when federal officials moved 140 sea otters to San Nicholas Island, about 60 miles off the coast, to set up a reserve population should an oil spill or other calamity eradicate the animals that live in near-shore waters.

To appease fishermen, who were angry about the furry competitors dining on prime shellfish harvesting grounds around San Nicholas, federal officials promised to round up any otters that strayed into waters south of Point Conception along the mainland. As many as 160 otters have been known to swim into those Southern California waters, designated by Congress as an otter-free zone.

At this point, scientists say, the remaining two dozen otters should be left at San Nicolas Island and others that live along the mainland should be allowed to expand naturally down the coast. Greg Sanders of the Fish and Wildlife Service said the agency is reevaluating its zone forbidden for otters, and will issue a preliminary decision this summer.

Bruce Steele, a sea urchin fishermen from Santa Barbara, said he was disappointed by the recovery plan.

“They continue to put fishermen out of business by allowing otters to gobble up all of the shellfish,” he said. “We are an easy target, but it is not going to solve the problem with sea otters.”

Steele said the most frequent cause of otter deaths is infectious disease.

“The thing that’s disturbing is that they have decided that 50% of the [deceased] animals [found] died from disease, and yet other than to study it, the plan has no recommendations of how to solve the problem,” he said.

Indeed, scientists have been frustrated by mysterious diseases that claim so many otters in the prime of their lives. Questions abound: Are the diseases a new threat, or have they always been around? Are stressed or malnourished animals falling victim, or are healthy animals also dying of disease?

Protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1977, the southern sea otter population peaked at 2,377 in 1995, and has since drifted lower to stabilize at an average of 2,150 in recent years.

Scientists estimate that about 16,000 otters lived along California before they were hunted nearly to extinction. The recovery plan sets the “optimum sustainable population” at 8,400, and suggests that otters could be removed from the list of threatened species if the population climbed to 3,090.