580 



been shooting and stabbing the otters, and the population seems to have declined 

 sharply. 



The fishermen regard the otters as competitors for the prized red abalone and 

 blame them for the declining harvest of the shellfish. Resix>nsible .scientists have 

 pointed out that the abalone are declining into commercial extinction in several 

 areas where there are no ottters, and they suggest that overfi.shing, .succored 

 by a wholesale price of $2.50 per pound for abalone meat, is the cause of the 

 decline. 



The illegal shooting goes on nevertheless. Men with rifles and binoculars have 

 been seen in the tumofifs along a clifEtop road running beside the refuge, scanning 

 the surf for otters. One man boasted (true or not) that he had shot 40 to 50 

 otters. These and scores of others killed came from a population that in May 1970 

 was tallied at 1,040 and estimated to total between 1,200 and 1,500 animals — the 

 highest population in a century. In February another count turned up only about 

 800 otters, and it is believed that the total (always greater than the census 

 because some animals are not counted ) is now about 1,000. 



The otters killed have been sacrificed to the mistaken belief that they threaten 

 a minute fishery for a luxury food that we could well do without. The town of 

 Morro Bay, population 8,500, is the self-styled abalone capital of California and 

 the center of the abalone-otter dispute. Despite this prominence in the matter, 

 only 25 families in Morro Bay make their living fishing for abalone or processing 

 them. With an annual otter population growth rate estimated at only 5 percent, 

 it could take as much as a decade to replace the missing otters, even if all per- 

 secution stops inmiediately. 



The California sea otter lives for the most part in a state refuge that includes 

 about 50 square miles of wind-tossed surf running south against the coast from 

 Seaside on Monterey Bay almost to Morro Bay. This is all that remains of a 

 former range extending from the coast of Washington south to central Ba:ja 

 California. The refuge is bounded approximately by natural deterrents to otter 

 movement. The animals do not like to leave the protection of the kelp beds, so 

 they are unwilling to venture into Monterey Bay in the north or into the waters 

 south of Cayucos on Morro Bay. Both of these areas are free of kelp and have 

 sandy bottoms that harbor little in the way of otter foodt 



lA general reluctance to migrate out of the kelp, however, has not prevented a 

 few of the more venturesome from traveling. If unmolested, they probably would 

 be able to repopulate a good part of their former range. One animal apparently 

 struggled all the way north from the refuge, past San Francisco, to Point Reyes 

 National Seashore, where the seamy side of human nature caught up with it. It 

 was found shot dead. 



Most of the trouble has occurred at the south end of the refuge., The kelp con- 

 tinues a few miles beyond the end of the refuge to Cayucos. This kelp is part of 

 the commercial abalone fishing grounds, though otters found there still are fully 

 protected. At one point the California Department of Fish and Game said there 

 were 90 sea otters, chiefly young males, hunting outside the refuge in the 

 commercial grounds. 



Ironically, the abalone industry is an artificial fishery that developed in the 

 nineteenth century as a result of the near extermination of the sea otter. Before 

 men began to molest the otters, they were at the top of the principal food chain 

 in the great beds of kelp off California's coast. The only creatures besides man that 

 prey significantly on sea otters are killer whales and sharks, and they tend to 

 stay out of the kelp forests. Two of the mainstays of the otter diet are sea 

 urchins and abalone, urchins reportedly being the preferred food if there is a 

 choice, although the abalone fishermen claim otherwise. 



The abalone dei)ends on the kelp-bed environment for its food but does not 

 eat or otherwise harm the living kelp itself. The sea urchin, on the other hand, 

 does eat the kelp, and inefficiently at that. It chews through the giant algae's 

 anchoring roots, thus obtaining only a few grams of food but causing the 100- 

 foot-long fronds to wash ashore and die. In this way one urchin can do a great 

 amount of damage in getting its food, incidentally piling up the shoreline with 

 rotting kelp. 



In the old days the otters kept the urchins' numbers down below the point 

 at which they posed any threat to the kelp forests. Healthy kelp forests sheltered 

 healthy populations of abalone and other sea life. 



It might be thought that the otters would keep the abalone cropped back 

 as much as they did the urchins. This was not so, it seems. Otters prefer urchins, 

 possibly because they are easier to pick up and eat than are the tenacious abalone. 

 Otters have been seen to dive as many as 20 times just to loosen one abalone 



