Sea otter population holds steady

The latest Sea Otter population numbers were release Monday for 2014. And depending on who you talk to, it’s either good or bad news. While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the numbers show a slow recovery for the endangered otters by static figures, leaders of the Otter Project say static numbers are a bad sign.

Federal biologists at the USFWS work alongside conservation partners in an attempt to conserve and protect sea otters, a federally endangered species. Scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, crunch the numbers each year through an annual range-wide field survey for management of the otters.

For 2014, USGS reports the population index as 2,944 (data available online). It’s a negligible bump from the 2013 report of 2,939.

“Through this partnership, we are able to use sound science to understand how sea otters are responding to threats, which tend to be different in different parts of their range, and may also change from year to year,” said Lilian Carswell, the Service’s Southern Sea Otter Recovery Coordinator.

And Biologist Tim Tinker with the USGS says, “For an animal so few in number, sea otter population trends can be influenced by many local and range-wide factors.”

Tinker continues, “We are seeing elevated mortality suggestive of food resource limitation in some parts of the range, and increasing mortality from white shark attacks in others. But our federal, state, aquarium, and university sea otter research alliance is making progress in understanding how all these trends relate to environmental factors along the California coast.”

The Otter Project, while fully aware of the challenges facing this playful creature, is not convinced otters are slowly moving toward recovery.

Steve Shimek, Executive Director of the Otter Project says these latest numbers are not good news, “The recovery of the California sea otter has stalled,” he says.

The Sea Otter recovery is keyed to the three year running average, or population index. The three year running average is 2881 otters, essentially unchanged from 2882 in 2013, according to the USGS study. An index of 3090 is required before the population can be considered for de-listing from America’s Endangered Species Act.

In recent years the California sea otter population has been growing in fits and starts with declines in the late 1990s and again a decline in 2009 and 2010. Otters were not counted in 2011. In 2012 and 2013 more otters were counted.

According to the Otter Project, an estimated 12,000 to 18,000 sea otters once lived along our Central Coast. Sea otters were hunted for their fur and the population was decimated in the 1700s and early 1800s by American, Spanish, Russian, British, and French traders. Thought to be extinct in California, a small population was ‘discovered’ near Bixby Creek in the 1930s when Highway 1 along the Big Sur Coast was first opened.

“This is bad news,” says Shimek, “The California Sea Otter is an iconic endangered species and to see it struggling to scrap back from the brink of extinction is difficult to watch; we must re-double our efforts.”

Shimek says, “Otters are dying from shark attacks, natural causes, and other things we can do nothing about, but they are also dying from diseases and chemicals washing from land. For over a decade now The Otter Project has led efforts to improve the ocean environment and we think we’re having an impact. Obviously we need to do more.”

As for the sea otter numbers in California, USGS and alliance researchers continue to analyze more than a decade of research to find the driving factors for their population.

Recovery is essential, say researchers, to benefit California’s near-shore marine ecosystem.

“We already knew that sea otters played a vital role in coastal ecosystems, but the exciting discoveries of the last several years suggest that we have really only begun to understand the far-reaching effects of this top predator,” says biologist Carswell. “If sea otters can recolonize new areas of their historic range, we are almost certain to see an upswing in population growth. That will be good for sea otter recovery, good for the near-shore environment, good for all of us—because we all benefit from the services that intact ecosystems provide.”