Sea otters have been on long, strange ride
Animal’s recovery off B.C.’s coast has changed ecosystem and economy
VANCOUVER— It’s been quite the ride.
Canada’s sea otters have gone from teetering on the brink of extinction, to staring down the proverbial barrel of an atomic bomb, to transforming entire ecosystems on the West Coast.
After being virtually wiped out during the fur trade centuries ago, sea otters are once again thriving in British Columbia waters and on their way to injecting more than $50 million annually into the provincial economy.
That’s the finding of a new study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
Otter watching, when people pay to see the furry creatures with flipper-like feet in the wild, could yield as much as $42 million a year, according to the study out of the Univesity of British Columbia.
Furthermore, the presence of these shellfish-eating animals allows kelp forests to flourish, creating new habitat for economically valuable fish like lingcod, adding as much $9.4 million to that fishery per year.
The study paints a clearer picture of what happens when an animal that was previously wiped out is successfully reintroduced in the wild, says Kai Chan, professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the authors of the paper.
“The biggest message coming out of the paper is about the tremendous benefits that await from efforts to reintroduce a top predator,” Chan told the Star.
But while the economy is gaining, some communities — including Indigenous coastal communities that rely on shellfish fisheries — are seeing the repercussions of having a thriving predator back in their midst.
The otters’ resurgence is part of their long, strange story off Canada’s West Coast.
The creatures were hunted to near extinction during the fur trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Then, in the 1960s, the U.S. government made plans to detonate an atomic bomb, for testing purposes, on Alaska’s Aleutian Island. The island, while uninhabited by humans, happened to be home to one of the last sea otter populations on the West Coast.
“(The U.S. government) realized that testing an atomic bomb on an island that had the last remaining sea otters was a bad idea, but not so bad they didn’t want to do it,” said Chan. “So they relocated those sea otters elsewhere.”
About 90 sea otters were transported and released to the west coast of Vancouver Island, according to Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans Department.
“The idea that they did not consult local communities … these days it would be unheard of to do that,” Chan said.
Three decades later, B.C.’s sea otter population had grown to 2,700 otters.
The new study shows how policymakers could do a better job protecting people from the unintended consequences of predator reintroduction, Chan said.
Because what is good for sea otters is bad for shellfish and the humans who harvest shellfish for a living.
Sea otters, unlike most marine mammals, don’t have blubber to keep them warm in the chilly Pacific Ocean and so rely on a high metabolic rate to keep their body temperature up. This requires them to eat a quarter of their weight, about 25 pounds, worth of sea urchin, crab, geoduck and other shellfish every day.
Wth several thousand sea otters devouring sea urchin, geoduck and crab off the coast of B.C., some local communities, many of them Indigenous, are hurting.
The province’s shellfish industry could lose as much as $7.3 million per year due to the reintroduction of sea otters, according to the study’s lead author, Edward Gregr.
He and other study authors quantified the effects of the presence of sea otters by combining food-chain data with economic values for fisheries, carbon pricing and tourism.
“We took those ecological results and we took the best available economic information to translate those biological changes into dollars,” said Gregr, an adjunct professor at UBC whose research focuses on coastal ecosystems.
The presence of sea otters will result in a 28 per cent decrease in the manila and butter clam fishery, as well as a 25 per cent decrease in geoduck clam catch, according to the model. Crab and sea urchin fisheries will also be affected.
Sea urchin populations, when left unchecked, can destroy large swaths of kelp forest that act as a refuge for many marine species, including fish.
Yet by controlling the sea urchin population, sea otters in fact create more habitat for fish species like ling cod, halibut and rockfish, which themselves make up a valuable fishery.
According to Gregr’s study, the so-called fin-fish fishery could increase in value by $9.4 million.
“It wasn’t a comprehensive analysis of all the costs and benefits,” Gregr acknowledged. “Food security for coastal communities was left out, for example, and cultural values also left out.”
It’s important that the communities that currently rely on the shellfish fishery for their livelihood are able to pivot if they wish, he said.
“Given this transformative change along the coast here and the focus of reconciliation in Canada these days, this could provide a pretty wonderful opportunity to reconcile the fisheries in some way,” he said, “and move toward a more equitable co-management strategy for all marine resources, not just the shellfish.”
The government may need to act soon. Communities on the west coast of Vancouver Island are likely already feeling these effects, said Gregr. Other places, such as the northern part of Haida Gwaii, will be affected by 2040, he said, adding it takes about 25 years for sea otters to transform an area.
The sea otter success story comes at a time when conservationists and biologists around the world are sounding the alarm about a mass extinction of species due to human activity. A 2019 UN report found that about one million species are on the verge of becoming extinct. “Countless ecosystems around the world are a shadow of their former glory, held back by missing key ecological players, just as the sea otters were missing from this coast for decades,” said Chan, who was the co-ordinating lead author on the UN report.
He hopes this study will not only show that quantifying the economic effects of wildlife recovery programs is possible, but also help governments ensure Indigenous communities are able to access the benefits of a more productive ecosystem.
“The challenges here will be to think boldly … and to take action that is just as inclusive of the interest of Indigenous people in local communities.”