Ben Ciccati

The otters are back! Santa Barbara residents have reason to celebrate: A raft of more than 30 otters has established itself off of Coal Oil Point, and this time it seems like they’re here to stay — unless of course Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) decides to send them packing.

This is unlikely, but with the no-otter zone still in place, it could happen.

Sea otters in Santa Barbara are the illegal immigrants of the marine mammal world. The otter raft that is currently living in the kelp beds off of Coal Oil Point is deep in the no-otter zone, a silly policy left over from a failed experiment from the 1980s in which FWS tried to establish a population of otters on San Nicolas Island. When special interests that rely on extractive use of resources (primarily the oil industry and the shellfish industry) balked at this, FWS made a concession: The otters got San Nicolas Island, but the industries got everything else.

San Nicolas Island was labeled a “translocation zone,” and the rest of the waters around it were officially declared a “management zone.” Any otters that unwittingly wandered into this zone would be “managed,” meaning they would be issued a one-way ticket back north.

This didn’t turn out as planned. Zonal management is a tricky thing in an ocean full of transient creatures. FWS realized that transporting sea otters was not only costly (up to $10,000 to ship one out of the management zone) and ineffective (several otters returned to the zone for another free ride), it was damaging to an already delicate sea otter population. Several otters died in transport, violating the legal requirement that the translocation of sea otters be nonlethal. FWS stopped shuffling otters in the early 1990s, and although the unsuccessful policy remained on the books, for all practical purposes, it was considered over.

The problem with this is that sea otters in the zone are not fully protected by the Endangered Species Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act. It was laws such as these that allowed the otter population to rebound to its current level, but once these protections are removed, otters are at risk. Anecdotal evidence points to signs of otters in the zone being harassed and even killed. Meanwhile, FWS, the agency mandated by law to protect and restore the sea otter population, is sitting on its hands. The release of the FWS’s final ruling on the policy is long overdue, and the public has a right to the decision it was promised.

There are still special interests that are not happy to see otters moving into the zone. Commercial fishers, particularly sea urchin divers, view the otter as a threat. Although it is true that otters are adept fishers themselves, what the fishing industry frequently overlooks is the fact that the sea urchin fishery, which relies largely on a Japanese export market for luxury sushi toppings, continues to be in a state of decline due to unsustainable management of the fishery. Furthermore, the proliferation of sea urchins that occurred along the Central Coast has had a myriad of adverse effects on the coastal ecosystems, laying waste to the bountiful kelp forest habitats that used to exist. Ironically enough, this sea urchin boom was made possible by the near extinction of the southern sea otter.

In 2000, the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara sued the FWS on its failure to uphold the no-otter zone. The court threw the case out, ruling that FWS must facilitate its own process to determine the fate of the program. FWS heard public commentary until 2006; although the fishing interests tried to rally support for maintaining the failed policy, the public came out in overwhelming support of ending the no-otter zone.

Otters are an important indicator species of coastal ecosystem health, and they are an economic boon to an area, especially along the Central Coast, which relies heavily on tourism. Restoring sea otters to the no-otter zone is by far more cost-effective than maintaining a failed policy­ — at the expense of the environmental and economic services sea otters provide­ — at the behest of a small industry that is unsustainably managed.

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