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.
(Music)
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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