Island Colony for Sea Otters Supported

The California Coastal Commission on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to establish on San Nicholas Island a new colony for the threatened California sea otter.

The 7-5 vote came over the objections of abalone fishermen, who said the otters’ voracious appetite would reduce their catch, but it was supported by environmentalists.

The commission’s approval represented one of the last hurdles before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to put its plan into effect in August. The California Fish and Game Commission is scheduled to take up the issue next month. It has been urged to approve the plan by Gov. George Deukmejian and the state Department of Fish and Game.

Representatives of a dozen environmental groups told the Coastal Commission, which met in Santa Monica, that the existing 1,650 California sea otters increasingly are being threatened by the possibility of oil spills from the growing tanker traffic along the central coast and by offshore oil wells. Oil can quickly mat an otter’s protective fur and cause death from hypothermia.

Currently, the otters range along a 220-mile stretch of the central coast between Ano Nuevo Island north of Santa Cruz to the Santa Maria River, and officials have said there is a better than 50% chance in the next 30 years that many of the otters will be killed by an oil spill. San Nicholas Island is one of the Channel Islands, south of Santa Barbara.

Rolf L. Wallenstrom, regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, warned in testimony Tuesday that the otter would be at great risk without a colony.

“If you have a population of those low numbers in one location as we do today . . . there is a great amount of jeopardy to all the critters,” he said. “We do not believe we would have a gene pool left to bring back the population.”

Carol Fulton, executive director of Friends of the Sea Otter, told the commission that the relocation plan was “an essential safeguard for the California sea otter’s survival.”

At one time, sea otters are estimated to have numbered about 18,000 in California. But, hunters and fishermen decimated their numbers, in large part for their fur.

A major feature of the proposal to establish the so-called “back-up” colony on San Nicholas Island is to prevent the otter from migrating to the Southern California coast and its fisheries. Plans call for capturing any errant sea otters and returning them to the island.

Otters have a voracious appetite, and it is estimated that much of the shellfish around San Nicholas Island will be consumed within five years.

Fishermen questioned how the otter could be contained on San Nicholas Island and its immediate surroundings. “For us, containment is a pipe dream,” Morro Bay fisherman Steven L. Rebuck said. “To us it’s only going to accelerate the sea otter into the Channel Island(s) area.”