Sea otters' revival in state waters brings new concerns

By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter

JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Two sea otters play in a kelp bed at Cape Alava, Clallam County. Sea otters, which were killed off by fur traders a century ago, rapidly are returning to the Washington coast.

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With eyes sharpened by a decade of field experience, he can tell it's going to be a good day.

"There's two resting groups over there," he says, pointing at distant mats of kelp undulating in the swell.

To the unschooled observer, nothing in the water remotely resembles a furry mammal.

"They look like little logs," Stafford prompts, attaching his spotting scope to a tripod and zooming in on a slumbering male floating belly-up, chin resting on its chest.

Then Stafford, too, settles into a comfortable perch for his day's work: quantifying the remarkable rebirth of a species eradicated by fur traders a century ago.

The summer sea-otter count is an annual ritual for Stafford and a dozen other biologists; this year, they tallied about 700 animals from Destruction Island, near the Hoh river, to the western end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The first census, in 1977, found 19 animals.

While most people welcome the otters' return, they already have become a nuisance to others.

Voracious eaters, the otters decimated sea urchins in Neah Bay, wiping out a lucrative fishery. A large group of animals then headed down the strait toward Port Angeles, picking the rocky reefs clean and forcing the state to cut back quotas for sea-urchin fishermen.

Wildlife managers expect those kinds of conflicts to increase as otters expand their range, possibly into the rich crab habitat around the San Juan Islands or the popular razor-clam beds near Grays Harbor.

"It's probably just a matter of time," said Michael Ulrich, a shellfish biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Later this summer, the agency will release a long-awaited recovery plan that recommends otters remain on the state endangered species list until their numbers more than double. The plan also will detail some of the clashes that are likely to develop between otters and people, and lay the groundwork for dealing with them.

The goal is to protect the otters and avoid the type of debate under way in California, where wildlife managers tried to herd otters away from prime shellfish grounds but failed, angering fishermen. Now, otter populations there are crashing for unknown reasons, while lawmakers, biologists and fishermen argue over what to do.

"There's a real potential in my mind for very serious conflicts here as well," said Glenn VanBlaricom, associate professor of marine ecology at the University of Washington.

"After years of doing this, you get a pretty good idea where they'll be," Stafford said as he swept his binoculars over exposed reefs, looking for otters hauled out on the rocks.

Alaskan transplants

Unlike California's otters, which frolic within camera range of tourists at Monterey Bay, Washington's rarely are seen because they live far from shore in sparsely populated areas.

"Most people don't even know they're here," Stafford said, turning his scope on a female nestling a pup on her belly.

"That fur is so dense. That's what made them such a target for the fur trade."

By the early 1900s, a succession of ruthlessly efficient Russian, English and American fur traders had killed every otter in Washington and Oregon, and all but a handful in California.

The animals thriving in the state today are descended from 59 otters transplanted in 1969 and 1970 from Amchitka Island, in Alaska's Aleutian chain.

The effort was a nod to wildlife conservation by the Atomic Energy Commission, which conducted three underground nuclear tests on the remote island from 1965 to 1971. The final one was the largest ever detonated — a five-megaton blast that killed thousands of sea otters, seals and other wildlife. The environmental group Greenpeace got its start protesting the tests.

More than half of the first batch of otters released in Washington died within weeks.

"They had this harrowing trip from Alaska, and then they were just sort of taken down to the beach and dumped," said Ron Jameson, a retired U.S. Geological Survey biologist who initiated the otter surveys and still participates every year.

Biologists took more care with the second group, keeping their fur clean and holding them in acclimation pens before releasing them near LaPush.

Still, the population teetered on the brink of extinction until the mid-1980s, when numbers started to climb about 10 percent a year.

A third group of otters transplanted from Alaska to Oregon died out.

	JAMES BRANAMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Volunteer Mark Stafford uses binoculars to try to spot Washington sea otters at Cape Alava, Clallam County, along the Ozette Wilderness Coast. Every summer, Stafford and other biologists come to the sea to tally the animals.

On the move

Cape Alava, Stafford's post for the census, long has been a favored spot for sea otters. But in the mid-1990s, large groups started moving north, rounding Cape Flattery and rolling into Neah Bay with immediate consequences for shellfish.

Sea urchins and abalone are otters' favored foods, but the agile and intelligent mammals also catch crabs, dig for clams and polish off mussels, sea cucumbers and starfish. Adults, which can weigh up to 100 pounds, consume 25-30 percent of their body weight each day in order to fuel their furious metabolism.

"I tell my students: That's more than 100 Quarter Pounders with cheese every day," said Stafford, who now teaches middle-school science and volunteers for the otter counts.

Within a short time of their arrival, Neah Bay's rich sea-urchin beds were picked clean.

"If you go out there now, there's just nothing," said Michael Ellis, a Bremerton-based fisherman who started diving for urchins in 1976 to feed a growing Japanese market for sushi items. Today, he and a handful of other fishermen harvest about half million pounds a year, primarily from the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands.

But a 30-mile stretch of the strait also was cleaned out when a group of 100 otters swam from Neah Bay past the town of Sekiu.

Biologists expected the animals to continue pushing eastward, but mysteriously, most retreated back around Cape Flattery.

Now, the population appears primed to move south, with about 300 animals concentrated around Destruction Island. For the first time, this summer's survey turned up an otter as far south as Cape Elizabeth, north of Moclips, said state marine-mammal biologist Steve Jeffries.

Ecological advantages

Historically, otters ranged all along the Washington coast and into the strait as far as Port Angeles. They apparently didn't live in Puget Sound, though habitat was abundant.

It's not clear whether the animals will be able to re-occupy all that old territory, particularly in places where boat traffic and human development are high, Jeffries said.

But in the places otters do take up residence, they can bring ecological advantages.

Most experts believe sea urchins proliferated unnaturally after otters were wiped out. And urchins graze on kelp, an important source of food and shelter for many marine species, including juvenile salmon. When otters gobble up urchins, that allows the kelp to rebound, Ulrich said.

While Washington's otters currently appear robust, they're still vulnerable to oil spills and other man-made calamities and ecosystem shifts. For reasons that scientists still are trying to puzzle out, sea otters are plummeting in the Aleutians, even as they thrive in southeast Alaska.

Ellis, the sea-urchin fisherman, says he expects sea otters eventually will eat into his business more, but he realizes there's not much state wildlife managers can do about it.

"We're all kind of scratching our heads, wondering what's going to happen here," he said. "If you're in the fishing business, though, you always have to be ready for things to change."

Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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