by Todd McLeish
Two more otters appeared briefly, well beyond the kittiwakes, but after we momentarily turned our heads away, we couldn’t relocate them again. The next otter was fighting the current, but doing so with aplomb and little energy. Its head appeared gray brown, definitely not the blond of the first otter, and it spent most of its time on its back, leisurely kicking with its flippers to propel itself through the opposing current, as if it were no effort whatsoever. When the animal stopped, it raised its head up high, as if to get a better view above the waves—a behavior Tim Tinker calls periscoping—before sliding back beneath the surface. And then it returned to its back for a bout of grooming, starting with a lengthy scratching of its belly and chest, then rinsing its paws in the water and working on its face—first its cheeks and then its eyes and neck—before jackknifing below the surface.
At one point, we watched as a small powerboat approached an otter, veering slightly in the animal’s direction, apparently to get a better look. A young girl sat on the bow staring straight at the animal, which didn’t appear to change its behavior, nor did it get out of the way. Nothing deleterious happened, but Webber said that it was probably a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It’s illegal to approach within one hundred yards of a marine mammal, he said. We also saw another boat zoom right by a different otter, seemingly oblivious to the animal’s presence and not likely an intentional act. Again, the otter didn’t move, as if the boater’s behavior was a common occurrence and the animal was unbothered. But the action was illegal nonetheless.
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IT TOOK A surprisingly long time for sea otters to recolonize the Homer area after the fur trade wiped them out. A small remnant population of otters just 180 miles away in the waters off the north end of Kodiak Island and another group in western Prince William Sound, even closer, survived the trade. But although a few individual otters were occasionally seen in Kachemak Bay in the 1960s—most presumed to be old males—it wasn’t until the 1970s that observations increased in frequency and a permanent population was established. An aerial survey in 1975 found just eleven sea otters, and several monthly surveys the following year turned up as many as forty-nine animals, mostly across the bay in Seldovia. Based on those surveys, it was estimated that the region had about four hundred sea otters, though most were believed to be males from the recolonized population on the outer Kenai Peninsula, which had been established from western Prince William Sound otters seeking new territories. Sea otters were not surveyed again in the area for twenty years. In 1994, 151 were counted by boat, including mothers with pups, and 355 were observed from the air, leading researchers to estimate a population of 1,104. A 2002 survey believed to be the most accurate to that date concluded that 912 sea otters lived in Kachemak Bay, but just six years later the population had more than tripled to 3,724, and by 2012 it had grown to nearly 6,000.
“That total is well within the carrying capacity of this area, but those are big jumps in population over relatively short periods, and we’re not entirely sure why,” said Angela Doroff, an otter biologist and research coordinator at the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. Over breakfast in Homer, she told me that the most recent jump could have happened from natural reproduction alone, but she believes that the previous population jump from 912 to 3,724 was likely due to a major influx of male otters from elsewhere into the area. As a result, she said, the Kachemak Bay population of sea otters has many more males than females, and that causes a great deal of stress on the female population.
“Once an adult female weans her pup, she’s in really poor condition,” Doroff said. “It takes a lot of energy to feed themselves and a growing pup, so they’re depleted, they’re bony. By the time that pup is ready to wean, they’ve used everything they’ve got, and they’re more subject to disease. They also get mating injuries from rogue males who are really aggressive. They get torn up, and they get infections, and they die. So we’re losing the reproductive component of the population. And I think it’s probably because we have a large group of males that has upset the balance.”
The skewed sex ratio also leads to more frequent pup-stealing, a food-stealing technique that occurs when a male sea otter holds a pup hostage until its mother gives up its prey. Doroff told me the story of watching a female otter trying to dive for food without allowing nearby males to harass her pup. On one brief foraging dive, the mother otter returned to the surface to find three males tugging at her pup. At length, she fought off the males and rescued her pup, and she even succeeded in retaining a clam hidden in her armpit. But more often than not a mother’s prey is sacrificed to protect her young.
The sea otter population in the Homer area is also unusual in that its habitat is quite different from that used by sea otters nearly everywhere else in its range. Instead of hard-bottomed habitat with abundant kelp, Kachemak Bay has mostly soft sediments free of kelp. And since the otters aren’t restricted to areas of kelp, they are free to roam and feed wherever food can be found. That means sea otters are often found feeding miles from shore. In fact, in the 1970s and ’80s, rafts of about one hundred sea otters were regularly reported to be seen thirty miles offshore in areas where soft sediments extended far out on the broad continental shelf, according to Doroff, and the animals almost never came to shore because they didn’t have to. Everything they needed to eat and raise their young could be found offshore. The soft sediments and absence of kelp in Kachemak Bay also means that the diet of sea otters there is much different from that of otters elsewhere. Instead of eating urchins, crabs, and sea cucumbers for the bulk of their diet, sea otters in the Homer area eat primarily clams and mussels, with only an occasional crab, urchin, or snail.
One thing about sea otters that has intrigued Doroff for many years is their remarkable ability to find food where none is apparent to human eyes. A member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s otter specialist group, she has studied the foraging habits of sea otters throughout their range. She says it is unusually difficult to study otter feeding behaviors in Homer because the animals often feed so far offshore that it is challenging to observe them. But in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, she conducted extensive studies of their foraging practices, watching to see what food item they captured every time they dived below the surface. She found that the animals were successful on 97 percent of their foraging dives, each of which lasted about ninety seconds, and most of the time they returned to the surface with more than one clam. But when she put on a wet suit and scuba gear to observe the habitat and availability of prey for herself, she swam around for forty-five minutes and only found one clam. “I had visions of what it was going to look like down there, but I was all wrong,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re cuing on, but I didn’t have it. They have a very different set of tools than we do.”
That impressive ability to find prey on or beneath the seafloor, along with their voracious appetite, has caused some in Homer to long for the days when sea otters were extirpated from the area and shellfish were more abundant. Local residents enjoyed the days of unregulated clamming in the 1960s and ’70s when it was easy to fill a fifty-five-gallon drum with several varieties of clams in half a day. Those were also the days when king and Dungeness crab, shrimp, and herring were abundant and commercial fisheries for those species thrived. While sea otters have had a role in the depletion of crab and clam numbers, they are often blamed for the overfishing of species they don’t feed on.
“Some people feel a great sadness because they remember a much more bountiful time—bountiful in a consumptive sense,” Doroff said. “They feel like things are out of balance, that it’s wrong, that there should be predator control because otters are wrecking the ecosystem.” But, she pointed out, sea otters evolved with all of those species and never exterminated them through hundreds of millennia. It wasn’t until the fur trade wiped out the otters that a shift took place in the ecosystem. And it was a shift that people liked and
one from which they made a living. Now that the system is shifting back to normal, a small segment of the human population is fighting to restore the previous status quo. But so far it has been a losing battle.
“Sea otters are certainly a key player, there’s no doubt about it, but so are humans,” said Doroff. “What I think we fail to realize is that there are more feet on the planet trying to extract more and more resources. The multiplier effect is huge. There is a whole human pressure on the system that has never been there before, and it’s something that we don’t acknowledge readily.”
Although the commercial harvest of most marine invertebrates in Kachemak Bay is unlikely to ever return to its former levels, regardless of whether sea otters remain, there are emerging shellfisheries that may achieve commercial success alongside a thriving otter population. In a few small bays on the south shore of Kachemak Bay, several entrepreneurs have established oyster aquaculture operations, and while a few otters have found ways to access the lantern nets holding the oysters, the animals have not been a significant problem to the farmers. The practice offers a bit of hope for the next generation of fishermen in Homer.
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RENAY AND I FOUND no stranded otters during the two days we were in Homer, though five were reported the previous week. So we left Homer and drove about two hours to Seward, where three giant cruise ships were anchored and the tiny tourist village was filled with vacationers wandering around looking for souvenirs and a fresh seafood lunch. We pulled into the Alaska SeaLife Center at the southern end of town, where we met Brett Long, the husbandry director responsible for all animal care at the facility. He works with a team of veterinarians and a staff of forty-two that cares for every creature in the place, from huge Steller sea lions and harbor seals to puffins, crabs, and a giant octopus. Long described the center, which opened in 1998, as “a research facility with a public interface,” even though it looks like what most people would call a modern aquarium. It was built in large part with funds provided by the settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and even though it doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure to clean oiled animals in the likely event of a future oil spill—the facility doesn’t have the equipment to separate the oil from the water after it is washed from the animals—the staff and equipment will probably still play a significant role.
Long said the center is charged with responding to any stranded marine mammal in south-central Alaska that is not on the US endangered species list, rehabilitating it, and releasing it back where it was found, if appropriate. The National Marine Fisheries Service can also ask staff of the center to help with animals stranded elsewhere in the state. They typically respond to thirty to fifty live animals per year, mostly harbor seals but also sea lions, fur seals, walruses, seabirds, and sea otters. It’s an unexpectedly small number of rescued animals, considering the forty thousand miles of the Alaska coastline, especially when compared to the one thousand animals rescued each year in California along just three hundred miles of coastline. The difference, of course, is primarily due to the challenging geography and sparse human population in Alaska.
The facility rehabilitates about two sea otter pups each year, almost always from the Homer area, but has rehabilitated only two adult otters—what Long calls “little Tasmanian devils”—in the sixteen-year history of the center. Their limited experience with rehabilitating adult otters has been with those that can be quickly treated for minor injuries like a boat strike and released.
After a sea otter pup has been stabilized at the center for two to four weeks, it’s time to determine its future home. Sea otters are in demand at aquariums around the world, but federal officials recently reinterpreted the rules for identifying appropriate sites to send them, making the process more complicated. Otters from the Aleutian Island and California populations are considered endangered, so it is illegal under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to export them outside of the United States. Those from south-central and Southeast Alaska, however, are not endangered and are therefore legal to export to aquariums abroad. Because most US aquariums that want sea otters already have as many as they can handle, they sometimes shuffle animals around to meet the legal requirements of where more recently stranded animals can go. For instance, if an otter pup from an endangered population strands, a US aquarium that has otters from nonendangered populations may send one of its otters back to the SeaLife Center so it can be sent abroad, and in return the aquarium will receive the otter from the endangered population. This otter shuffle provides legal and safe homes for all stranded sea otter pups. It’s an expensive proposition, since the pups require constant care and grooming for several months before they can take care of themselves, but most aquariums seeking otters are willing to accept that cost and responsibility.
Not every aquarium abroad that wants a sea otter can have one, though. Aquariums first must have facilities that meet US animal-care standards, and they must have a government oversight system in place that will hold that facility to those standards. “They have to get their government to sign off on it, basically saying that if they don’t hold the facility to our standards, we can come and take the animals back,” Long explained. “A lot of foreign governments aren’t willing to do that. And beyond Europe, the challenge is the philosophical approaches to animal care that are very different from what we require.”
The governments of Denmark and France were the first to jump through the new legal hoops. When I visited the SeaLife Center, it was holding three sea otters destined for Danish and French aquariums that were completing their new exhibit spaces. Long escorted Renay and me behind the scenes of the center to see the future European residents. We walked through several double doors to a space that looked like a small laboratory and then into what could have been a tiny medium-security prison—beige walls and four gated sliding doors with small windows. I glanced through the first window to see a six-foot-square pool sunk four feet into the floor, with an area around it for lounging. It’s a space typically used to rehabilitate seabirds and to hold sea otters for short periods. Quietly resting on their backs in the water were two six-month-old rescued otters named Agnes and Aurora, lying perpendicular to each other. They didn’t remain quiet for long. As soon as she saw my face in the window, Agnes dived beneath the water and quickly emerged, squealing loudly, a grating noise that sounded like a high-pitched whistle or screaming little girls. It was not a normal sea otter vocalization but a learned behavior to get attention. Long said that baby otters scream all the time, but their mothers don’t tolerate it for long. Their human caregivers, however, feel bad for the animals and let them get away with it or feed them to keep them quiet. Agnes just wanted to be fed and thought that our arrival signaled that it was feeding time. It wasn’t, so she squealed repeatedly until long after we departed. Across the hall was a similar enclosure where Nuka, a four-year-old male sea otter in the midst of being shuffled from the Oregon Coast Aquarium to France, was perched on the edge of the pool waiting for mealtime. And a trip to Europe.
Chapter 7: Necropsy
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA
THE MARINE MAMMALS Laboratory at the Alaska headquarters of the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage looks much like a lot of other scientific laboratories I’ve visited. But this one is designated primarily for conducting necropsies of marine mammals, especially sea otters. Its mix-and-match group of cabinets was filled with chemicals, tools, and various supplies and equipment for dissecting fresh or frozen carcasses. Large picnic coolers containing recently delivered animals or tissues lined one wall. A walk-in freezer was filled with twenty years’ worth of animal parts—mostly sea otters, but also seals, sea lions, walruses, and polar bears—that had yet to be a priority in any scientific study. Two industrial saws sat waiting to be used to carve through bones and sinew. Tissue samples and skulls sat in jars, soaking in formalin. And inside a ventilated laboratory hood sat a plastic tub filled with dermestid beetles gnawing the flesh from animal bones.
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bsp; The centerpiece of the room was a stainless-steel table about ten feet long with a sink at one end to allow a putrid array of animal fluids and chemicals to be easily washed away. Where those liquids go, I didn’t know, and I really didn’t want to find out. Lying on the table was a large black trash bag containing a male sea otter that had been thawing for four days. It was an animal identified as FW14026, meaning that it was the twenty-sixth sea otter to be necropsied in 2014 by the Fish and Wildlife Service. It had been found dead two weeks earlier on Holiday Island, a small island a half mile off the east-central coast of Kodiak Island, near the village of Kodiak. Since the sea otter was part of the Aleutian Island stock of otters that is listed on the US endangered species list, determining its cause of death was a priority.
Renay and I had been invited to observe the necropsy, which would be performed by Kristin Worman, a Fish and Wildlife Service biological technician who conducts several such procedures each week. After an extensive orientation session, she asked Renay to assist with the procedure, and Renay enthusiastically agreed. Together they weighed the bagged otter and determined it to be forty-nine pounds, which is on the light side and suggested that it may not have been eating well in the weeks leading to its death. When they opened the bag to remove the animal, the odor in the lab quickly went from a clean antiseptic smell to the stench of decomposition; either it dissipated quickly or I just got used to it, because I hardly noticed it a few minutes later. The otter’s fur was soggy and matted as Worman began a general evaluation of the animal’s physical condition, noting minor scarring on the nose, flippers, and paws.
