There are times where nature astounds with it's power, with it's grandeur, with it's scale and intricacy. Think storms, sweeping vistas, the size of the Pacific or so many impressive landscapes, and the beauty of a butterfly wing or a banana leaf if you stare close enough. Now you might not expect Grumpy to think this way, but sometimes it astounds in it's cuteness! If Walt Disney or Walter Lantz had tried to come up with the cutest damn thing they could dream up, I am not sure it could come close to a few of Natures more compelling creations, passing perhaps the puppy, kitten, Shamu, Cambodians, baby pandas and seals in the fuzzy whiskery big eyed charmer category, and to make it funnier, what if perhaps the cutest creature ever had the personality of a grumpy drunk or combative crack head, something Dave Chappelle would love to take on...and that personality only made it all the more Daffy Duck lovable. Now throw on an environmental survival story that is really one for the books, a story with bad guys, exotic intrigues and a final surprise so fascinating that you are surprised more people don't know about it...
who am I talking about.. this funny lil punk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0OyhHeelyo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5UTJlECrrQ&list=PLiZ4KRbgzDQ_vNc3CKZkfRKhWbYneaEur
that last one.. the birthday cake one.. was so cute.. I just vomited in my mouth...
There were no Sea Otters where Muppet's creator Jim Henson grew up in the Mississippi River Delta areas of the eponymous state, but there were river otters, their cousins... enough to perhaps inspire a lifetime of duplication...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uFy_LDrgm4
all right... I must have made my point about their adorability... now drag in the bad guys:
Our bad guys come to us from Russia, and those of us who grew up with the cold war, we are more than used to demonizing them, it was a sport when I was a kid! In fact, our bad guys really come from the Fur markets of Europe and China 300 years ago, and perhaps the Russians were trying to make a buck, but that's too complicated, let's not muddy the waters with split culpability, and humanity, that's so Un-American! So suffices to say, that there is nothing quite like Sea Otter fur, and it ain't just cuteness.. since the animal never developed blubber like so many other large warm blooded sea creatures, it's a hollow hair, and it grows at densities of close to one million per inch... to contrast, the average human head has about 700 per square inch before thinning and baldness set in (and oh how they set in...)... the hollow nature of the hair gives insulation in the only way that insulation really works. by trapping gas, in this case air. They have to forage pretty regularly to stay alive, but the sea otter is a pretty trim physical specimen considering all that, and it's pelt practically sheds water.. making it, and here's the rub, one of the most, of not the most, valuable skin on earth for a while. Now I have seen the skin trade, and I am not talking about the red light district... and I can get you an American Puma Skin for like 600 bucks, a rabbit for almost less than a Sham-Wow, a tiger for maybe 1000, and I can say without a doubt the famous price for the last otter fleece to come into Peking before the market dried sometime in the 1800's of 100,000 USD is something to be considered.. the Chinese and everyone else who needed to stay warm loved and knew the value of Sea Otter skin, and it didn't help the little buggers stay alive once people started coming their way.
They used to range from Japan (maybe even the Koreas or China?) all the way to Baja, in a big horse shoe around the North Pacific, and I am just guessing at a population as high as a half million, but the events I am about to describe changed all that. In the time of Tsarina Anna of Russia, not a particularly popular leader, it was decided to explore Siberia and beyond in a great scientific expedition. A German Naturalist named George Steller was recruited, a smart and ambitious young man, as well as Danish Sea Captain Vitus Bearing. The story of their expedition to eventually discover Alaska for the western world and open up the north pacific to exploration and eventual exploitation by Europeans is documented better than I ever could in one of my favorite books, Where the Sea Breaks it's Back, but keeping this germane to the fuzzy li'l wonder's story that I am describing, it suffices to say that Steller was the first naturalist to apply western science to the Pacific Sea Otter, as well as dozens of other creatures, and his expedition would also pave the way for it's downfall, as well as the extinction of a few other creatures, as even as the Bearing expedition was shipwrecked and starving, the men aboard struggled to preserve the pelts they had taken on this first foray, knowing their value...
The Russians who followed armed with the stories taken from the survivors of this trip in the mid 1700's came with a thirst for 'Furry Gold' (just made that up... it sounds hilarious!). Russians beset first the Aleutians then mainland Alaska with violence in their quest for riches, capital among them: firs. There were battles fought in the Aleutians that set the tone for 100 years of Russian Rule, and armed with slaves they collected in the Aleutians who were useful of their hunting ability, the Russians ranged possibly as far south as Baja California in their search for Sea Otter pelts over the next 80 odd years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_fur_trade
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they made it as far south as Fort Ross officially, now on the Sonoma County Coast (near Bodega Bay for you Hitchcock fans), and ranged from their settlement there likely down as far as they could find pelts, which were extirpated from the Baja coast according to accounts sometime around then. This was the activity that inspired the Anza Expedition to leave Sonora and found the Presidio of San Francisco in order a secure Spanish territorial claims at the time, which were more than under threat by the Russians from an Economic standpoint at the time. They sure do cause a stir, when all they want to do is be left alone to eat some clams and sea urchins, and nap on the waves...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Fur_Rush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_otter
You might imagine that given the value on their head, and the skill of the Aleutians and the Russians, and any other Native Americans that might have been recruited or impressed to help with the hung, and even the Spanish and their native guides, who couldn't have been immune to the trade, that the Southern part of the Otters Range didn't stand to last long... up in Alaska and on the coast of Siberia, there were more inlets, nooks and crannies to hide out in, and the population, if not thrived, survived in large numbers. I myself have watched otters float and fuss in areas I have had the privilege to explore around Prince William Sound, where their populations took a huge hit in the wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (the oil destroyed the insulative quality of their skin, let alone what it did to their food web and habitat), and even where they were so damaged just 20 years ago they were common enough that it felt like the further back you got the more you saw.. they would poke a head up and take a look, I hate to say it, in a manner that more than reminded me of crack heads I saw running around the projects I used to pass almost daily in my youth.. there is something almost offhandedly but humorously aggressive about them, perhaps defensively aggressive, fitful, like some old ghetto lady who don't trust you no way no how.. she's tryin' to mind her own damn business, but she's a watchin' you! Maybe that's too strong, maybe it's just a French attitude.. that kind of plucky indignance, like a grumpy French Heroin addict. You know how California is.. it's the new France... People who work with them in animal rescue centers like the one in the Marin Headlands talk about how quick they are to bite, even though they can be cute and endearing as a cat seconds later.. they just want to be left alone... is that so wrong!
That crotchetiness obviously was hard earned.. everything from Orcas to Great Whites wants to eat them up, which is why they hang in the shelter of the kelp forests, and in a funny way, they spur the growth of their own shelter.. you see, when they are present, they eat up a lot of the species that compete for territory with Kelp taking root on the seafloor... when they eat up the urchins that take over, the kelp gets to root in, which increases kelp growth, and as they expanded their range again over the last 80 years, so did kelp forests. and that's just the beginning of their benefits tot he general habitat as kind of the king browser of the kelp world:
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sea-otters-boost-seagrass-growth-20130826,0,7071924.story#axzz2s8LNahR4
So expanded their range !?.. I have been talking about them basically being extirpated for the last few paragraphs. What could I be talking about.. didn't these Aleutian hunters and their Russian Masters hunt them to extinction... Well, almost.. enter Hope, stage left...
For as many as 150 years, the Eastern Pacific Sea Otter was thought to have been extirpated, read exterminated for it's fur, from the south east portion of it's territory... from somewhere in British Colombia or Alaska South.. it had managed to survive and rebound in Alaska and Siberia, come up to numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but there was just a spot someplace on the Canadian or Southeast Alaskan Coast where even with protection since 1911 under the Fur Seal treaty which finally tried to secure the future of Northern Pacific pelagic populations of pinnipeds and other such things from extinction, which had already eliminated such creatures as the Stellar Sea Cow from this earth, they hadn't strayed south from. There weren't enough of them to displace in territory.. there was literally so many sea urchins and bays and bights to re-habitate in these ragged inlets and coasts, thousands of miles of coastline, that there was no need to go further south.. to make an Alaskan Joke, Animals are much less likely to become End of the Roaders than people... even when adolescent males strike out like they do in so many other mammal populations, it wasn't gonna be all the way down past Vancouver and into the US when there was no one to mate with down there, and it was a hell of a long trip... well, almost no one...
In the 1930's, with America in the grips of the depression, it's President and Congressional leadership set about an ambitious program to rebuild and expand the nation's infrastructure in many unique and creative ways. While examining this movements impact on the environment would be a whole other topic of massive proportions given the size of the undertakings, the environment did fare well in the net total it would be fair to say. Huge areas were put under either complete protection as national parks and given infrastructure for public visiting, or less perhaps picturesque or unique wild areas were still put under management by government agencies like the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to become kind of national economic reserves of sorts, with better soil conservation and environmental balancing with their economic utility, kind of a technocratic Win-Win.. better management leads to a better economy... amongst the projects that came out of these undertakings were large works to create Scenic Highways in America.. Henry Ford had long since popularized the Automobile, and President Franklin Roosevelt mandated vacation time and a 5 day work week, knowing that in leisure there would actually be both cultural benefits and an expansion of the US economy... which we now call tourism... so if the government built roads like the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Natchez Trace, people would take their time to drive down them and explore all that nature they keep hearing about in the big cities... one such project was a highway down through a place called Big Sur.. to be fair, the project had started well before, after World War I, but progress was slow and perhaps not a priority despite groups as disparate as San Quentin prisoners and writer John Steinbeck working away until the whole New Deal Thing kicked in... so again how does this have anything to do with the Sea Otters I have been prattling on about for the last 20 minutes?
Well, when they were finishing up the Bixby Creek Bridge, perhaps the largest single project of the whole now famously scenic road, the workers there noticed a small colony of about 50 sea otters... from Internet research it is hard to put together exactly what happened when, but it appears that they built the bridge in 1932, and a man named Howard G Sharpe created or took over a lodge within sight of the bridge for visitors to enjoy. Sometime in 1938 it appears, he began to publicize the fact that this must be a remnant population that had survived the great hunts of the 1700's... these 50 little buggers were descended from how many survivors I couldn't guess, but somehow enough to breed and not create birth defects had survived and were having a fine time undiscovered by the mamologists of the day until Sharpe pointed it out... they were already protected of course, and their numbers began to grow, slowly but surely... before the 1750's, California alone was thought to have had a population of 16,000 according to some estimate that made it onto Wikipedia. That ends up defining the fantasy of an ideal state as I have spoken about before in my piece on Cougars in Alaska (no, not Sarah Palin!). I don't know how many Otters the Native Americans of the time might have harvested for fur or what have you, likely not many given the bounty available of food in the coastal areas of California, although I have heard anthropologists talk about tribes becoming so populous that there were bouts of starvation due to the utter livability of the place until they would max out the carrying possibilities of the areas (sound like modern California?), and it would have been my guess that they lived back into San Francisco Bay and perhaps even some other unique large estuaries that might no longer exist like along the waterfronts of Los Angeles.
I once read an account of an Otter being adopted by some Navy Sea Bees, Naval Engineers, on an Aleutian Island during the campaign there during WWII. He got himself stuck somehow in a dock that belonged to them, and they called a medic, sedated him, and spent a long time releasing him, brought him to a hospital, then watched him while he recovered with a lot of love right around that dock (if you have never been to the Aleutians, they are beautiful, but there isn't a whole lot to do without being creative.) I try to imagine that the workers on the Bixby Creek Bridge were similarly touched by what they saw.
The population now in California is a matter of great obsession and examination. Due to their presence on the Endangered Species List as a threatened animal, and since there was a focus on Pacific Coast Ecology after the Santa Barbara Oil Spill in 1969, their status and recovery are handled by the USFWS, and of course this means a count, the kind of stuff I love to report on.. numbers in action... environmental sports score:
http://www.werc.usgs.gov/ProjectSubWebPage.aspx?SubWebPageID=23&ProjectID=91
Scroll all the way to the bottom for the count number. When I first tried to write this post, it was during the Government Shut down of 2013, and in the effort to kill Obama Care, they had shut down all government web sites.. I hope this one keeps working.
So it ain't 16,000, it's closer to 3,000. now given that in 1938, the assumption was that we didn't have any at all south of Alaska, not so bad. I see no mention that geneticists ever tried to figure out how low the population had dipped before the 50 were discovered in the 1930s, but it might have been ten or fewer. There have been genealogical studies, quite a few, but I don't see mention of speculation on this one fact, although I have heard of it being determined in other mammal species. until the two populations meet up, or 5 populations as it is now described, with 5 distinct recovery populations from Northern Japan to now the Channel Islands of California.
There were two famous translocations of note, five actually. One brought otters from Russia to mix with some in Alaska, then there were attempts to have them resettle on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington (somewhat successful), the Oregon Coast (failure), off of Vancouver Island (successful) and on San Nicolas, one of the Channel Islands off of Santa Barbara which are now part of a plane and boat accessible national park. It was partially successful, with 59 now living from about 150 that were brought there to create a separate more remote population to improve survivability. What happened was that a lot of the otters tried to swim back to where they came from instead of sticking around someplace they got dumped by a bunch of meddling scientists... what do they know!? That's the otter attitude, anyhow... the few that did stick around are now dong ok, giving us this population of 59 this year in the 2013 count. Then there was a little guy who made it up to the Oregon Coast on his own and hung out until a big storm a few years back, in the late aughts I believe, after which he wasn't seen again. It wasn't known if he came from the population in Washington State or California, but it was kind of neat, or portent of what might be to come if things keep going well. And I haven't even mentioned what might have been a similar remnant population in an inlet of British Colombia, but this story is more fun in Cali, even though it's easier to film up there, you know, because of the whole Union thing...
After posting this, I stayed a bit obsessed, holed up in a nice hotel resting from some trucking around, and I learned that this story of a remnant population being the seed of the whole recovery isn't unique to BC and California. It turns out that that isn't the exception to the story while populations up north remained robust. They in fact have done a bunch of genetic study, sometime in around 1990, maybe not on the California Population, but they concluded that the whole survival of the species came from about 13 remnant populations that collectively numbered a few hundred, or less.. this was a good story when I just knew about the 2 remnant populations.. now it seems almost less probable and more remarkable. They have now grown to the 5 distinct geographic populations described above:
http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/nearshore_marine/pubs/Bodkin_Monson_2002_Arctic_Res_US.pdf
So what keeps them from jumping into San Francisco Bay or over it to what must be some pretty invited territory in Northern California, or coming south around to Santa Barbara or hopping across the Channel Islands into Mexico, or setting up permanent shop with the other quirky characters in Venice Beach or La Jolla? There are many reasons, but major ones include pollution, and just not wanting to be around other people. Like the Monks in Big Sur, they are a bit Misanthropic. Every time they come past Pigeon Point someplace near the base of the San Francisco Peninsula, just north of Santa Cruz, they seem to get in trouble. The population increases as you get closer to the Golden Gate, and think of all the water swept out from the bay, and with that, there are diseases from Human Run off that can get into the bivalve population, the clams and mussels they might eat, and make them sick. California being California, they actually get medical service, both because they are still considered threatened (they have to cross 3,090 for three years I read) and because that's the kind of wacky stuff Californians like to do to protect the environment, so there is a network of care that they get, both through the Marine Mammal Center in Morrow Bay and the Marin Headlands but through a partner system they set up where the Monterrey Aquarium is actually their hospital:
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/aa/timelinebrowser.asp?tf=90
They have a dang MRI machine! California is something..
Anyhow, what is keeping them from making these jumps is a combination of human influences, these populated sections of coast hemming them in a bit, and also just a lack of population pressure quite yet again.
Since the last three years were a bit flat in population growth, this 2008 data isn't as old as it seems.
If you sift through the injury reports, you can see that White Sharks have started to have a taste for them again, and that life can be a bit crazy for an otter the same way it can be for a person living on the edge... it's a wild world riding the waves... and one more funny thing that occurs to me.. if they did start to go south and north, they might increase kelp in some of the major Surf Breaks, and how would the locals feel about that? it's scary enough without wondering what that is touching your foot all the time... Anyhow, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it I guess, hoping the punks at Paloes Verdes or Johhny Malibu and his buddies in the Surf Punks don't start a ruckus when the Sea Otter Clan invades their territory looking for a good ride:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfq0bvVhQWw
What an inviting welcome, and that ain't the half of what they will hit when they get to the Tijuana River, but we got time to sort it out right now...
http://sandiego.surfrider.org/2013-tijuana-river-action-month-schedule
http://www.sewagehistory.com/tijuana.html
we'll keep trying to take care of this, and hopefully they just keep breeding and laughing.. like all Californians just want to do anyways...
Thanks for a little fuzzy whiskered Hope you guys... no matter how wacky the weather gets, or how bad things like DDT might have impacted such a beautiful place one, we got you, babe, the Pelagic Sonny Bono's. now if Otters could just do something about LA traffic, the place might be truly livable for us as well!
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