Alaska's sea otters to receive federal protection

By Marla Cone
Los Angeles Times

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Southwest Alaska's sea otters, which have undergone dramatic and mysterious declines in recent years, will receive Endangered Species Act protection under an Interior Department proposal announced yesterday.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton said scientists are not yet certain what is driving the sea otters around the Aleutian Islands toward extinction. "But," she said, "listing this population as 'threatened' under the Endangered Species Act will be an important step in discovering the reasons and reversing the decline."

The Center for Biological Diversity, based in Arizona, petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the otters in 2000, and in December, two animal-welfare groups sued, seeking to force a listing decision.

Southwest Alaska's ocean ecosystem has collapsed in the past decade, scientists say. A variety of once-abundant sea mammals has nearly disappeared.

Alaska's sea otters were nearly driven to extinction a century ago by commercial fur hunters, but the population rebounded after hunting was banned in 1911. By the 1980s, the region was again a stronghold for otters, the waters' thick kelp forests home to more than half of the world's population.

But since then, the otters' numbers have dropped by an average of about two-thirds.

A group of scientists, led by James Estes of the U.S. Geological Survey, has theorized that the otters are being eaten by killer whales.

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