A Wildlife Conservation SUCCESS: The Miraculous Return of Canada’s Sea Otters

The magnificent coastal waters of British Columbia

are home to an abundance of incredible marine wildlife

including humpback whales, steller sea lions,

orcas, porpoises, and harbour seals.

The BC coast is also home to one of the

most iconic, recognizable

and lovable aquatic mammals:

the sea otter.

With its long whiskers and

grizzled facial fur,

these endearing animals have

fittingly earned the nickname:

the “old man of the sea”.

But despite their cute appearance

and engaging antics,

sea otters have actually endured

a long dark history in North America,

once pushed to the very brink of extinction.

My name is John E. Marriott,

and this episode, we’re EXPOSING you

to one of Canada’s great environmental success stories:

the miraculous recovery of the

once-extirpated sea otter

on the BC coast

Sea otters are unique in that they're

the smallest member of the marine mammal family,

yet also the largest member of the weasel family.

Found around sheltered islands, reefs, fjords, and bays,

sea otters feed on a variety of seafood,

including clams, mussels, crabs, and sea urchins

It’s not uncommon for sea otters

to float around in the water on their back

with their food on their belly

like a picnic spread on a table,

and remarkably, they’re one of the

only animals in the world

to use tools like we do.

using rocks and other objects to crack

open their hard-shelled food

to get at the yummy stuff inside

Sea otters require a ton of food

to stay warm in the cold, coastal pacific waters

and eat up to 30%

of their body weight every single day.

Unlike other marine mammals,

they don’t actually have a lot of

body fat to insulate themselves,

which is why they have one

of the thickest fur coats in the animal kingdom,

made up of two types of hair:

long, sparse guard hairs

and feathery-soft, super dense warm underfur.

Unfortunately, it's these beautiful, luxurious coats

that are the very reason sea otters once vanished

from British Columbia and Canada altogether.

Before the fur trade began in the early 1800s,

the world’s sea otter population was estimated

at between 150,000 and 300,000 animals.

But by the early 1900s, just a century later,

the population had been totally decimated

by our insatiable appetite for their fur

and less than 2,000 animals remained.

Eventually, the sea otter

disappeared from the BC Coast completely

The last otter shot

and killed off Vancouver Island in 1929.

The long road to recovery for our sea otters

began with the combined efforts of

federal, state, and provincial governments

in both Canada and the United States.

Between 1969 and 1972,

89 sea otters from Alaska

were released in Checleset Bay

off the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Amazingly, this reintroduced population

prospered almost immediately in the superb coastal

habitat and by 1996,

had doubled more than 4x to over 1500 otters.

The stunning initial success of the reintroduction

led the federal government to downgrade

the sea otters’ status as a species at risk

from ‘endangered’ to ‘threatened’.

By 2004, the population had

expanded even more dramatically,

with sea otters found as far south as

Vargas Island in Clayoquot Sound,

as far north as the northern tip of Vancouver Island

at Cape Scott., and as far east as

Hope Island in Queen Charlotte Strait.

Today, sea otters have expanded even

further afield in British Columbia and their

status has been downgraded from a

‘threatened’ species to one of ‘special concern’.

Their continued recovery and expansion

on the West Canadian coast

is now considered one of the most

successful mammal reintroductions in Canadian history!

But this astonishing success story doesn’t end there:

sea otters are known as a ‘keystone species’

meaning that even a small number of them can have

a dramatic effect on shaping healthy ecosystems.

If we look back at when sea otters were eradicated,

rocks and reefs quickly became overrun with

dense populations of sea urchins and

these sea urchins in turn wiped out the kelp forests

that are so critical to our ocean’s health,

essentially removing the ‘rainforests of the sea’

so called because of the kelp forests’ ability to provide

food, shelter, oxygen and

a nursery environment for a wide variety of sea life

So with sea otters reintroduced and

reoccupying their former habitat

and resuming their crucial role in the ecology

of BC’s coastal ecosystems,

the environmental spin-off has been remarkable:

the out-of-control sea urchin populations

have been brought back under contrtol,

and the kelp forests have

returned and flourished, completely reshaping our coast

in a wonderful way.

Despite the success of their reintroduction,

sea otters continue to face a number of threats.

The most serious is from environmental contaminants

like oil spills

Oil spills are catastrophic for sea otters

their fur loses its buoyancy and insulating capabilities

and the otters end up dying from exposure.

Those otters that do survive initially,

end up inhaling and ingesting oil

when they groom their oil-slicked fur

causing even more deaths.

Not surprisingly, the sea otter populations

took almost three decades to recover from

the Exxon-Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska.

For these reasons

it's critical that we continue to protect

sea otter habitat

and continue to monitor and reduce

the risk of oil spills along the BC coast.

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