From the Magazine



On a foggy day in mid-September, I go looking for a glimpse of a colossus on the outer edge of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, the wildest stretch of coastal wilderness in the Lower 48. Olympic National Park doesn’t much cater to the faint of heart; it’s infamous for its vertiginous headlands and remote beaches where hikers get cut off by rising tides. Fortunately for lilydippers like me, there’s a rare soft opening from Lake Ozette out to the rugged seashore at Cape Alava.


I walk on.





Though the sea otter is thought to have evolved some two million years ago, its story doesn’t really pick up until 1742—the year the shipwrecked crew of explorer Vitus Bering’s Russian expedition limped back to Kamchatka in an improvised boat. The crew had survived nine months on a barren island by eating the flesh of a winsome and gregarious little sea mammal that lived in the shallows and was clumsy as a seal ashore. When the men finally made their escape, they crammed their boat to the gunwales with its heavy pelts.

The sea otter is something of an arriviste among marine mammals. The only ocean-dwelling member of the mustelids—think saltwater weasel—it lacks blubber, the layer of specialized fat that insulates other marine mammals against the the heat-sucking properties of water. It makes do instead with its fur, the densest of any on earth. Sea otter fur packs an astounding 645,000 hairs to the square inch. Too heavy for women’s wear, the fur was fashioned into hats and trim for men’s robes. There was already a brisk Asian coastal trade in Bering’s day. But the western Pacific held few sea otters. Bering’s tattered crew brought news that a gold mine of sea otters lay just 200 miles offshore to the east. The fur rush was on.


British and American exploiters weren’t far behind. In 1778 Captain Cook touched in at Vancouver Island (not yet so named), where his sailors did a little trading. When they put in at Macao months later, they were astonished to discover that Chinese buyers would pay handsomely for the bedraggled sea otter furs they’d been sleeping on. Within a decade Americans and Englishmen were trading for sea otter furs on the Northwest Coast; trading the furs for tea, silk, and spices in China; and selling those luxury goods in the West Indies, England, and New England. The influx of new wealth from this triangular trade transformed New England’s fishing, whaling, and farming economy in the early 1800s. New England textile mills were built on sea otters’ silky backs.


Finally, in 1911, an international treaty banned trade in sea otter fur. The gesture was largely moot. The animal that Bering’s naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, believed “surpass all other amphibia in play and frolicsomeness” were already presumed all but extinct from Prince William Sound to Mexico.





The main hitch in relocating the sea otters was the animal’s perennial challenge: its coat. Fur is a high-maintenance alternative to blubber. Sea otters’ skin hangs loosely on their bodies, and the rubbery little contortionists can pull the remotest reaches of it up to their mouth and forepaws. They’re constantly squeezing out water, scrubbing, fluffing, aligning, blowing air into the hairs, spiraling to sluice away food scraps. The air trapped in the otter’s fur provides buoyancy—it’s why they float so high—and cushions their skin from the bone-chilling water.

A caged sea otter can’t wash itself. Dump a soiled otter back into the water and it displays a disheartening tendency to become hypothermic and drown. The biologists gave up trying to transplant them.


Biologists on Amchitka weren’t happy about the doings of the “Firecracker Boys,” as Inupiat Eskimos had memorably dubbed the atomic energy boosters. Nevertheless, they noted with interest the C130 cargo planes on Amchitka disgorging supplies and returning empty.

“How about we fly some otters out on those planes?” they asked. The Firecrackers Boys, mindful of the good publicity, agreed. In July 1969 AEC-chartered cargo planes flew 29 sea otters to Point Grenville, Washington.

It was a circus, says Karl Schneider, a biologist at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, now retired. “Cages of frantic, filthy sea otters were opened right on the beach, surrounded by reporters and rubberneckers.” Some animals had to be prodded into the water with poles. Within two weeks 16 had washed up dead. It’s thought none survived.




When I was a kid I used to like to build bombs and blow things up,” Schneider recalls ruefully, “and those AEC guys seemed to us basically just like bigger kids with bigger bombs.” Nevertheless, he believes that more than one good thing came of it. The AEC funded not only the extraordinary otter diaspora, “it also brought all these smart graduate students together up here and fostered a lot of valuable collaboration.” One of those was Jim Estes, a lanky 25-year-old from San Diego who had just flunked his Army draft medical. Though he had studied elephants for his master’s degree, any port in a storm, he figured—even one in the Bering Sea—would do. His fieldwork on sea otters would ultimately revolutionize how ecologists understand the world. The sea otter is a god, Estes discovered—the god of the kelp forest.




When Jim Estes arrived in the Aleutians in 1970 he found himself presented with what he calls “a ready-made experiment just like a checkerboard—islands with sea otters and islands without sea otters.” He soon noticed a pattern: Islands with sea otters had kelp forests. Islands without sea otters had only pebbly green carpets of sea urchins.



Now Estes and colleagues have found that the god of the kelp forest even affects carbon sequestration. “Sea Otters Are Biocarbon Ninjas!” a recent headline proclaimed.

Researchers around the world have found that the sea otters’ story has parallels in jungles ruled by other kings. In the tropics, the loss of jaguars, cougars, and harpy eagles prompts an eruption of herbivores, which subsequently denude the habitat of understory plants. On coral reefs, fishing for sharks and other predators leads to changes in resident fish species that favor the growth of algae and limit corals. Every kind of ecosystem displays such effects. “We used to think apex carnivores were sort of icing on the cake,” Estes says. “That you could kill them off and secondary predators would take their place. That the system would keep working.” What ecologists now see is that when you take the apex carnivores out of the landscape, the landscape itself changes—“and typically becomes more impoverished,” says Estes. “Less productive, less diverse.”


The new understanding makes restoration of the otters along this Olympic coast even more important. How have they fared? That’s a question with an answer, thanks to the tenacity of a USGS biologist named Ron Jameson (now retired, though not so you’d notice) and a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife marine mammalogist named Steve Jeffries. Jameson and Jeffries have been coming out to the coast almost every summer for 30 years to monitor sea otters.


Elsewhere in its range this smallest of marine mammals figures in headlines with lamentable frequency. California’s sea otters are caught in an endless wrangle with abalone fishery politics, chomped with growing frequency by great white sharks, and infected with parasites from cat feces in runoff. In southeast Alaska and British Columbia, shellfish fishermen clamor for sea otters’ blood. Lately Aleutian sea otters have suddenly all but up and disappeared. Down the gullets of killer whales, one theory has it, but no one knows for sure.


Standing atop my drift log at Cape Alava, there’s not a boat as far as the eye can see. Only a passing gray whale lofting misty breaths and a pair of angular little Dall’s porpoises snipping across the waves. The otters are beginning to scull north in a lazy line. A century ago human avarice extinguished sea otters here. A fluke of international politics and public relations brought them back. That they’ve been able to thrive here is thanks to a nobler side of human nature: When sea otters were returned to these frigid waters they found that the stewards of their habitat had been able to keep this long stretch of coast essentially intact. Perhaps we will take a lesson from that.

This story originally ran in the January-February issue as “The Urchin Keepers.”