by Todd McLeish
Peavey grew up in Oregon and came to Alaska to work in the fishing industry as a college student. She settled in Craig twenty-eight years ago. She acknowledges the importance of marine conservation and says she and her husband have no desire to wipe out otters entirely. But she is convinced that otters must be actively managed and their population reduced if the local communities are going to survive. In addition to the otters’ effects on the commercial fishery, she worries that as the animals get closer to the villages, “you can kiss your subsistence fishing goodbye, too.” She also points out that the kelp beds throughout the area are healthy and abundant and “don’t need the otters to save the ecosystem.” She appears to be right. During our three hours traveling on the water, large patches of living kelp were nearly always visible, including in areas where Peavey said otters had arrived only months previously, so the animals apparently weren’t necessary to the maintenance of the kelp beds.
When we arrived at the San Fernando fishing grounds, no otters were visible, but Peavey was sure they were around nearby. Bad weather was forecast, and she said the otters know when storms are on the way, so they were probably in protected spots in the vicinity. And besides, she pointed out, we had just seen close to two dozen otters less than a mile away, an easy commute for a sea otter.
To the uninitiated, this stretch of coastline doesn’t look much different from almost everywhere else you look nearby—steep rocky shores topped by tall spruces and cedars, rimmed by alders and crab apples, and at nearly every turn a bald eagle or three perched in a tree or on a pile of rocks. The divers work the sandy seafloor from thirty to seventy feet deep to collect geoducks, and harder-bottomed areas are scoured for sea cucumbers.
We headed north again along the eastern shore of San Fernando Island, past a Styrofoam buoy blown in from the 2012 Japanese tsunami, toward Eleven Mile Pass, a dive-fishing destination between the northern shore of the island and western shore of Prince of Wales Island. Again we found no otters on the fishing grounds, which surprised Peavey. Pointing out another patch of kelp, she said that the fishermen harvest the kelp as part of the regulated herring fishery. They entrap the herring in a seine net, hang kelp fronds into the seine, and wait for the fish to spawn on the kelp, at which time the fish are released and the fishermen collect the fish eggs for sale to Japan. “We accept the rules and the management plans for all these species, and the state manages them well to conserve the resource,” she said. “We just need a similar management plan for the otters or it’s all going to go to waste.”
Peavey nodded toward the Maurelle Islands in the distance, one of the sites where the state successfully reintroduced sea otters in 1968, then turned to circle tiny Rosary Island, noting a spot where dive fishermen Stephanie and Brad Jurries are known to fish for geoducks.
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THE DAY BEFORE my tour with Peavey, I met Stephanie Jurries at a public meeting for stakeholders seeking to discuss sea otter–related issues in Southeast Alaska, but she was the only commercial fisherman to attend. While most of the meeting dealt with the concerns of the Alaska Native communities, she held her own in articulating how otters were affecting her industry. While her husband dives for geoducks, Stephanie is a licensed sea cucumber fisherman, something she pursued after working in a coffee shop and fish processing plant. She paid $7,000 in 2007 for her commercial permit to harvest sea cucumbers, and she feels lucky she got into it when she did, since a permit cost $30,000 in 2014. She says that cucumber picking is easy, especially compared to harvesting geoducks. “You just swim around and pick them up,” Stephanie said. “There’s a lot involved, but I was able to pick it up pretty quick.” When she’s on the seafloor collecting cucumbers, a two-hundred-foot air hose tethers her to a twenty-one-foot landing craft that her husband maneuvers to follow her progress. When she fills a bag with cucumbers, he drops down a line that she secures to the full bag, and he hauls it up. Then he drops down an empty bag and she continues picking.
The cucumber harvest season runs for about eight weeks beginning in October and takes place only on Mondays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and on Tuesdays from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Each fisherman is limited to harvesting two thousand pounds of cucumbers each week, which Jurries said most fishermen used to be able to collect in a couple hours on Monday, but now it takes most fishermen until Tuesday morning. The state manages the sea cucumber population by collecting data on the harvest every Thursday during the fishing season and opening or closing particular fishing grounds depending on the health of the cucumber population.
According to Ginny Eckert, sea cucumbers may be the best-managed fishery in Alaska because the state Department of Fish and Game surveys the population on a regular basis, enabling it to make decisions about how many cucumbers can be sustainably harvested from week to week. “It takes a lot of work to find cucumbers these days,” said Jurries. “We actually run around in a skiff with an underwater video camera to do survey work just to find them. The fishing grounds for cucumbers are changing, and it’s all because of the otters.”
While that’s not entirely true, she’s not far off. The frequent state surveys of sea cucumbers have enabled Eckert and other researchers to separate the effect that sea otters have on the sea cucumber population from that of the fishermen, something that cannot be done with any other fishery. Based on examinations of data as far back as 1994, when the state surveys began, Eckert said that “the impact of the otters is a function of time. The longer the otters have been there, the larger their impact is.” In areas that sea otters recolonized prior to the beginning of the surveys, sea cucumbers are almost entirely absent, whereas in areas only recently recolonized, cucumbers are present but declining in number. Wondering if something besides sea otters could account for the decline, Eckert conducted a similar analysis of cucumber populations in areas where sea otters have not yet returned. She found slight declines in cucumber numbers during the sixteen-year span of the survey, up to about 20 percent in some areas, but nothing like the 100 percent drop in longtime otter zones. “It’s a pretty impressive relationship,” said Eckert. “Where we have no otters we have a much higher density of cucumbers, and as they colonize the area longer we see much lower and lower abundances of sea cucumbers.” So even though sea cucumbers aren’t the most preferred prey item of sea otters—they make up only about 13 percent of the otters’ diet—the sea otters still drive cucumber populations to near extirpation over time. And, according to Eckert’s study, commercial dive fishing has little or no effect on the density of sea cucumbers in Southeast Alaska.
What does that mean for sea cucumber fishermen like Stephanie Jurries? She knows that it’s just a matter of time before she has to change careers. And in the meantime, she said it’s a challenge to keep up with the changing cucumber populations from one place to another. One of her favorite places to dive for sea cucumbers was a place appropriately—or not—called Sea Otter Sound, which was finally closed to dive fishing in 2010. “The last day that I dove there, I was literally diving with the sea otters as they were eating cucumbers beside me,” she said. “The next time that place was scheduled to open, it was immediately closed because there was no viable fishery left. There were just too many otters in the area.” She said that is happening again and again throughout the region and forcing her to travel farther away to fish. “Fish and Game has all this survey data to figure out the sustainable level of harvest for the fishery, but they can’t account for the fact that the otters are moving in and eating everything. One area that was going to have a seventy-thousand-pound quota was closed because the otters ate them all, and another place had a forty-thousand-pound quota that was cut to seventeen thousand pounds, which is so little that nobody even went there. The otters are changing our entire season.”
Strangely enough, Jurries’s opinion of sea otters started out much like that of most nonfishermen. “I was just like everybody else—I thought otters were cute and fuzzy,” she said. “And they still are. But like a
nything else, they need to be managed properly. Everybody’s hands are tied now because the Marine Mammal Protection Act is prohibiting people like me from hunting them. They need to manage otters like they would any other wildlife population. That’s all that needs to happen.”
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ALL OF THE FISHERMEN in the region seem to agree about one thing: if sea otters are not “managed,” the future of their fisheries is in jeopardy. They’re probably right. Most of the biologists I spoke with agree that commercial shellfisheries and a healthy sea otter population in Southeast Alaska may be mutually exclusive. But, sadly, the kind of sea otter management the fishermen seek is lethal. They want large numbers of sea otters killed. That’s happened before, of course, during the maritime fur trade two centuries ago, an event that most people today condemn for nearly driving sea otters to extinction. What did we learn from that experience? That unless all of the otters are killed, they are going to quickly reproduce and recolonize wherever food is available. So killing a portion of the sea otter population isn’t likely to resurrect the fisheries, at least not for long.
For more than one hundred years, a similar effort against coyotes has been undertaken throughout much of the American West. Millions of coyotes have been killed to prevent them from preying on sheep and other domestic livestock, and after all that, the population of coyotes is healthier than ever. Because as coyotes are killed, new territories become available for other coyotes to populate, and reproduction rates increase to fill those niches where abundant food resources are available. Sea otters have already proven that they are able to grow their population at a rapid rate to recolonize their historic range. Killing a segment of the population under the guise of “management” will just allow them to demonstrate that they can do it all over again.
Jim Curland of Friends of the Sea Otter calls the kind of management that the fishermen have in mind “predator control,” which is an illegal form of wildlife management when it comes to sea otters. Yet the fishermen’s fear for their livelihood is real, and I certainly don’t blame them for seeking out whatever means they can to keep their industries afloat. To make their case, the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association commissioned a report on the economic impact of sea otters on the fisheries. Called the McDowell Report for the consultants who conducted the study in 2011 (which was a follow-up to a similar report in 2005), it claims that sea otter predation on sea cucumbers, geoducks, sea urchins, and Dungeness crabs cost the Southeast Alaska economy as much as $28.3 million between 1995 and 2011. The authors say that sea otters in the region ate 3.2 million pounds of sea cucumbers from 1996 to 2011, 3.1 million pounds of red sea urchins from 1995 to 2005, 2.7 million pounds of Dungeness crabs from 2000 to 2010, and half a million pounds of geoducks from 2005 to 2011. The report concluded: “In short, commercial dive fishing and large populations of sea otters cannot coexist in the same waters. In addition, once the commercially viable biomass of crab and macroinvertebrates—such as sea cucumbers and geoducks—is gone, it likely will not return given sustained sea otter predation.”
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone to disagree with that conclusion, including that last line. In 2013, the dive fishery association asked the state to survey areas that were closed to sea cucumber harvesting in 2001, to see if the population had rebounded, and there were hardly any cucumbers to be found. So it is unlikely that the fisheries will rebound unless the sea otter population crashes.
But not everyone agrees with other aspects of the McDowell Report, especially when it is put into the context of other economic realities. Rick Sinnott, for instance, a retired biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, wrote in the Alaska Dispatch News that a report commissioned by the Alaska Wilderness League found that nonresident visitors spent $360 million in Southeast Alaska in 2010 and 2011, and 42 percent of that spending was on observing wildlife, primarily viewing charismatic species like sea otters. He noted that the economic value of wildlife viewing to the region was “89 times the payroll generated by sea urchins, geoducks, and other marine invertebrates harvested by dive fishermen.” Compared to the number of salmon and herring fishermen who would benefit from a healthier kelp ecosystem that sea otters provide, and the potential economic benefit to the region in the form of ecotourism and wildlife viewing, the decline of the dive fisheries over the next decade may not affect the region’s economy as badly as many fear, at least not over the long term. But try telling the dive fishermen that.
Other elements are impacting commercial dive fisheries as well. Biologists speculate that the decline of sea cucumbers in areas that have not been colonized by sea otters may be due to any number of changes to the ecosystem or environmental conditions, like ocean acidification, as a result of the changing climate. No studies have been conducted as of yet to identify the causes of those declines, but it is clear that otters are not the culprit. “Other things are going on in the fishery besides just otters,” said former Fish and Wildlife Service otter biologist Verena Gill, “but you wouldn’t think so talking to the fishermen.” The geoduck fishery is also facing issues unrelated to sea otters. During the 2013–14 season, the fishery came to an abrupt stop when customers in China—which represents about 99 percent of its market—found some clams contaminated by paralytic shellfish poisoning. Although the toxin does not harm the shellfish, it can be lethal to humans. When the fishermen tried to sell their product to Taiwan instead, the state of Alaska conducted tests of the geoducks, found the toxin, and shut down the fishery. “There’s no doubt that sea otters consume a huge amount of what they [the fishermen] fish for, but they’ve got more going on in their industry than sea otters,” Gill said.
Chapter 9: Significantly Altered
SITKA, ALASKA
WHILE THE DIVE fishermen in Southeast Alaska seem anxious to see the region’s sea otter population exterminated, the opinion about sea otters among Native Alaskans isn’t much better. That’s because the otters are making it more and more difficult for tribal members to find the traditional foods they are used to harvesting from coastal areas to feed their families. “What the sea otters like is what we like—crabs, sea cucumbers, sea urchins, clams,” said Mike Jackson, who works for the Organized Village of Kake, a federally recognized tribe on Kupreanof Island, centrally located on the Alaska panhandle. “Sea otters have surrounded our village now. There are pods of fifty to three hundred that hang out together. They’re wiping out our customary traditional foods.”
At the mouth of Gunnuk Creek and Little Gunnuk Creek in Kake, for instance, where a wide tidal flat allows tribal members to drive onto the beach to dig for butter clams, cockles, and littlenecks, sea otters have moved in and absconded with the bulk of the harvest. “They’re really sneaky,” Jackson said. “They come in with the tide, and you can hear them using their little hammers opening the clams when the town is quiet at nighttime. We usually harvest thousands of pounds for ourselves for the winter, but now we have to scratch to get any.”
It’s the same story one hundred miles to the south in Klawock, a predominantly Native community on Prince of Wales Island, where families used to harvest sea cucumbers, clams, and cockles to share with tribal members. When Dennis Nickerson was a young boy, he harvested shellfish with his family at nearby San Cristobal Channel and Cruz Pass. “That’s how we practiced our system of bartering,” he said. “It’s one of our more common practices that we still use to this day, something we handed down from generation to generation. That’s how we made sure our families were fed; it’s done on a community basis.”
But the sea otters have made that practice more difficult.
“It’s been a while since I’ve harvested shellfish on our side of the island because the areas we used to go to just have empty shells on the shoreline,” said Nickerson, a Tlingit member of the Prince of Wales Island Tribal Sea Otter Commission. “We sat on the beach in silence a while back, and all we could hear was the sound of otters pounding shellfish on a rock.
They were decimating the area. There’s barely anything left.”
It’s a story that Sonia Ibarra has heard again and again from Native Alaskans up and down the coast of Southeast Alaska. A doctoral student at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, she is interviewing Alaska Natives from throughout the region to document how sea otters are affecting the harvest of subsistence foods, capturing memories of how earlier generations coexisted with sea otters, and mapping the sites where families harvested clams and other foods before sea otters returned to the area.
“There is a lot of consensus that people are having a hard time harvesting important foods that they’ve harvested for a long time, foods that are an important part of their nutritional intake,” Ibarra said. She’s hoping her study will identify how to balance the needs of people and sea otters, and she has received a wide variety of suggestions.
Ibarra believes that the best idea so far is to use a kind of marine spatial planning to define areas where subsistence harvesting is productive and convenient, and attempt to keep otters from those locations—by hunting or other means—while allowing otters to freely use other areas. “It’s the same idea as traditional stories I’ve heard, how people coexisted with sea otters in the past,” said Ibarra. “The really productive shellfish areas, close to villages, were for people to harvest, and outside that area was designated for sea otters.”
How that would be accomplished is another story. The California effort to declare a no-otter zone was an expensive failure, since it’s nearly impossible to keep otters from going where they want to go. Until this or any other strategy is implemented, however, local Natives will remain frustrated and angry that little has been done to resolve the issue to their satisfaction. And they lay most of the blame on the federal government and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
