Fishermen Want Sea Otters Moved Again

Claiming that federally protected sea otters continue to overgraze commercially important urchin beds, a group of fishermen wants a Los Angeles judge to enforce a “no otter” zone by making wildlife officials relocate the animals.

In a lawsuit filed this fall against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a group called Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara asks that the 70 to 200 otters routinely spotted in Santa Barbara kelp beds be removed from fishing grounds that stretch from Point Conception south to the Mexican border.

U.S. District Judge Margaret Morrow has scheduled a hearing in February.

Wildlife officials counter that moving the endangered otters may be at worst harmful and at best temporary because they would swim back. During past relocation efforts, wildlife officials note, otters have died or disappeared on their way back to local waters.

Private environmental groups argue that the otters must be given free rein to repopulate the entire coast in order to survive. They say otters--once hunted to the brink of extinction--are at a sensitive time in their recovery. Their population increased to 2,300 last spring after four years of steady decline.

After witnessing sea otters take over an area where he fished for 15 years, sea urchin diver Harry Liquornik, president of the commercial fishermen’s group, stressed that his argument is with federal regulators and not otters.

The fishermen would not be in court at all, attorneys agree, if wildlife officials had upheld a “no otter” zone established by law in 1987.

The law allowed federal biologists to trap and move 140 sea otters to San Nicholas Island, the farthest out of the Channel Islands, in hopes of establishing a second breeding population to protect the species from illness or an oil spill.

In exchange, the law called on the wildlife service to protect the rich shellfish industry of Southern California by trapping otters along the coast and returning them to the northern range.

Some otters died in transport, others died within days of release, and even more swam back to their home area. Now, there are only 20 to 25 otters at San Nicholas Island, most of them descendants of the experimental population. No otters have been moved since 1993.

Liquornik said he was taking $60,000 worth of urchins from an anchorage just south of Point Conception annually before otters moved in.

“It made up half of my income,” he said. “When the otters moved down, they pretty much took over. . . . Fish and Wildlife is doing nothing to stop them.”

He currently dives for urchins out of San Pedro Harbor, and expects to move back north near the Channel Islands in December.

Urchin fishermen get paid as much as $1 per pound for whole urchins, and prime urchin roe can be sold for $200 a pound in Japan, according to the California Seafood Council.

Federal biologists argue that it’s natural for the dynamics of the shellfish population to change as otters, which eat urchins, return to their historic range.

“In an area where there are otters, you are less likely to find abalone and urchins sitting out in the open two and three deep,” acknowledged Greg Sanders of the wildlife service.

The California sea otter, or southern sea otter, is a species similar to but distinct from the otters found off the coast of Alaska. It was believed to be extinct in the early 1900s, but a small colony was observed off the Big Sur Coast in the 1930s and 1940s.

“What the fishermen really want is to get out of this some recognition of range management of sea otters,” said Jeff Young, their attorney. “This is what Congress had in mind by passing this bill.

“The animal needs to have adequate range to grow, but there need to be sea otter-free areas as well.”

Don Mooney, the Friends of the Sea Otter attorney, said fishermen are using the San Nicholas Island compromise to try to stop otters from naturally expanding.

“The translocation law specifically says that if you move otters, it has to be in a nonlethal manner,” Mooney said. “We had a 16% mortality of the species with translocation.”

“We never were in favor of or believed that you can take an oceangoing animal and contain it,” said Jim Curland, science director of Mooney’s group.

Liquornik said that if the otters move into Southern California, it will change the entire market for urchins, lobsters and crabs. While he has been able to move his urchin-diving business to other areas, he believes that can’t go on indefinitely.

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Sea Otter Population

Complaining that endangered otters have overgrazed local urchin beds, Santa Barbara fishermen want wildlife officials to enforce an otter-free zone by moving the animals. Environmentalists say that could harm the otters just as their population rebounds.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service