After spending twenty years helping the sea otters of Northern California reestablish their territory along the California coast, they succeeded. The endangered otter population has rebounded. However, The 2009 spring sea otter count shows that the California sea otter population continues to decline. The total number of sea otters spotted was 2654, down 3.8% from last year’s numbers.
Now the fishermen are unhappy in the area, because the otters are eating up their profits in abalone, snails, clams and sea urchins. Seems otters and people like these yummy seafood items. They staples in the otter diet. Each otter consumes about 15 pounds a day of of them. They are taking a serious bite out of the seafood going to the sushi restaurants.
So to appease the fishermen and save the otters, the US Game and Fish Department decided to relocated them to an island about 30 miles off the coast where they could live in nirvana unmolested forever.
Well the sea otters being intelligent creatures wanted to go home. The island was not home, so they swam back to the cost and now are foraging for food from the fishing nets. OOPs!
Trouble is brewing over territory. Urchin divers calls the 4-foot member of the weasel family no matter how cute he is a real threat to the $10 million-a-year urchin industry.
Let Lilian Carswell, who oversees otter recovery at U.S. Fish and Wildlife, with Allison Ford Executive Director of the Otter Project and the California Sea Urchin Commission, know you want them to find a solution that saves the otter and the urchins.
Excerpts courtesy of http://www.bostonherald.com/news
Image courtesy of http://www.global-dvc.org/html/Copy_of_otter_broers.jpg