Sea otters almost disappeared from California’s coast entirely. Hunted for their pelts through the 18th and 19th centuries, the southern sea otter population collapsed to somewhere around fifty animals by the early 1900s. Fifty. From an estimated 20,000.
They held on. A remnant population survived near Big Sur, and from that narrow thread the species began its slow return.
Today, researchers track populations that have grown over 20% in certain stretches of coastline a number that would have seemed impossible a generation ago.
Part of that recovery runs through the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sea Otter Program. Orphaned pups, animals that would die without intervention, are pulled from the water, raised, trained, and released.
The program teaches them to forage, to dive, to read a kelp forest. Surrogates, actual wild female otters, do much of that teaching. The aquarium understood something simple: a sea otter raised by humans becomes dependent on humans.
So they built a system to make themselves unnecessary.
The ecological stakes are real. Sea otters eat sea urchins. Sea urchins, left unchecked, strip kelp forests to bare rock. Kelp forests absorb carbon, shelter fish, buffer coastlines.
The otter sits at the top of a chain that holds the whole nearshore system together. Fewer otters means more urchins means less kelp means a poorer, quieter ocean. The math runs the other direction too.
California’s coast is not healed. The southern sea otter remains listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the population still hovers around 3,000 animals which is a fraction of its historic range.
Recovery is not the same as restoration. But the otters are hunting again in waters where they were absent for a century, and the kelp is responding.
That counts for something.
I had to keep this week’s article short. I’ll be going to a wedding this weekend and that’s when I usually have the time to write. Since so many of us are on budgets, I’ll be helping my friends set up and tear down.
We got to have each other’s backs in these trying times.
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Your Neighbor,
Benji Faun
SOURCES:
Mayer et al. (2019), Oryx — The International Journal of Conservation
“Surrogate rearing a keystone species to enhance population and ecosystem restoration”
(https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/576223)
2. Monterey Bay Aquarium press release
“New Study Confirms Monterey Bay Aquarium Surrogate-Reared Sea Otters Helped Restore Threatened Population in Coastal Estuary” — September 23, 2019
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