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“History shows again and again how Nature points out the folly of men… Godzilla!” (YouTube video) Blue Öyster Cult, “Godzilla”

After 24 years of banning sea otters from most Southern California waters and relocating them to San Nicolas Island to try to establish a colony, (where did these people go to college?) federal wildlife officials said yesterday that they propose to ABANDON the program, and that it did not help the threatened species. (Note added August 30, 2011: Actually, from the stats below, it looks like the program HELPED TO EXTERMINATE a lot of members of the threatened species! Yikes!) The proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would allow sea otters to expand naturally into their historic range (Yaaaaaaa!) off Southern California and end the relocation program!

Way back in 1987, the feds relocated 140 sea otters from Monterey Bay to San Nicolas Island, which is 60 miles off the California Coast. The goal was to establish a new population of southern sea otters, in case a disaster such as an oil spill threatened them with extinction! In a compromise with fishing groups (who ALSO may not understand biology! ) the feds declared a “no-otter zone” from Point Conception to the Mexican border. They also promised to “round up” any otters that strayed into Southern California waters, where they dine on shellfish, in competition with fishermen.

What happened to the relocated sea otters? They swam back to rejoin the parent population, disappeared, or died. (I think that it is reasonably safe to assume that “disappeared” = “died.”)

“About half of the otters we brought out there, we don’t really know what happened to them,” said Lilian Carswell, southern sea otter recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “We learned that the basic, underlying concept was flawed: that you can move sea otters in this mechanistic way and expect them to do what you want them to do instead of what they want to do.”

Duh!

Under the new plan, the 46 otters at San Nicolas Island (My! THAT was successful, wasn’t it?) would remain there and no longer be considered to be an experimental population. Sea otters in Southern California would be given the same protection as sea otters have along the Central Coast! The Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to release  a draft of the decision by next month, according to an agreement reached last year with conservation groups (the Otter Project and Environmental Defense Center) that SUED the agency in 2009 to force the end of the relocation program.

Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Sea Otter, the Humane Society of the United States, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium applauded the decision in a joint statement that called the relocation program “ineffective and harmful.”

“For sea otters to have a real shot at recovery, they must be allowed to return to their historic range off the coast of Southern California,” they said. “If sea otters thrive again throughout their historic range, the entire marine ecosystem will benefit.”

The last time that the Fish and Wildlife Service moved otters out of Southern California was in 1993, after it became clear that the relocated otters were dying.

“Nobody really thought that you could take an ocean-going animal and draw an imaginary line and tell it not to go there,” said Jim Curland, marine program associate with Defenders of Wildlife. “People were very skeptical that you could take an animal, physically move it to an island and expect it to stay.”

In 1999, large numbers of male and juvenile sea otters started to move seasonally into Southern California in search of food. Fishermen filed suit with the Fish and Wildlife Service for not moving them north, and the government presented the biological opinion that continual relocation out of Southern California and to artificially limit the expansion of their range would continue to place the sea otter population in jeopardy.

Once upon a time, sea otters inhabited waters from Oregon to Baja California, and in the 19th century, numbered 16,000. Fur traders almost exterminated the sea otters in the early 1900s, and only a small colony of 50 survived along the California Coast in Big Sur. The animals were protected as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1977.

Sea otters have made a slow recovery and number about 2,800 today. As they have exhausted their food supply along the Central Coast, wildlife authorities believe that they only way for the population of sea otters to continue to recover is to allow them to go wherever they want.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is requesting public comment on the plan in the next 60 days, and the decision could become final by 2012.

-Bill at

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