Return of the Sea Otter by Todd McLeish

Author:Todd McLeish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8: Cucumbers and Geoducks

PRINCE OF WALES ISLAND, ALASKA

AFTER ALASKA attained statehood in 1959, it became responsible for the small sea otter populations in the state, and from 1965 to 1969, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game relocated 403 sea otters from the Aleutian Islands and Prince William Sound to six sites in Southeast Alaska: Cape Spencer (25 otters), Yakobi Island (30), Khaz Bay (194), Biorka Island (48), the Maurelle Islands (51), and the Barrier Islands (55). An unknown number was also reintroduced to Yakutat Bay just north of the region. Out of all those otters, just 106 survived the process and, along with their offspring, have spread throughout the outer coast of the region. Many continue to infiltrate the archipelago’s nooks and crannies. Those 106 otters have multiplied into more than twenty-five thousand otters, according to a 2012 survey of the area, more than eight times as many as are found in all of California and a 12 percent annual growth rate that continues unabated.

Zac Hoyt, a doctoral student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, has spent nearly ten years studying the sea otter population in southern Southeast Alaska, and he has modeled the growth of the population in a variety of ways. He said that, unlike for sea otters in California and other parts of Alaska, there has been nothing to regulate the population of otters in the southeastern part of the state. Whereas sharks and killer whales are keeping the otter population in check elsewhere, the otters themselves are the apex predator in Southeast Alaska. The only limitation to the growth of the population is the availability of food, and so far there seems to be plenty. Hoyt also called Southeast Alaska’s sea otters a “closed population,” meaning that no sea otters are emigrating from other areas into the region, nor are sea otters from Southeast Alaska moving elsewhere. Their population is growing entirely through their own reproduction.

But Hoyt’s model indicates that it isn’t happening in a predictable manner. The sea otter population in southern Southeast Alaska has, in fact, grown in a herky-jerky way, with some areas experiencing rapid growth, others growing slowly and steadily, and still others seeing their once-abundant population crashing altogether. When the first organized sea otter survey of Southeast Alaska was conducted in 1975, the animals were found to have expanded their range from the initial release sites, but there wasn’t much of a build-up in the population numbers. A few otters had reached as far north as Coronation Island, off the northwest coast of Prince of Wales Island, about thirty-five miles from the Maurelle Islands release site, but most had traveled much shorter distances. The next survey, in 1983, discovered that the range expansion in that area had slowed, but the density of animals in the places they were found had grown significantly. Five years later, biologists learned that the otters were on the move again, colonizing the Bay of Pillars and Sumner Island to the north and Lulu Island to the south.

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