MOSS LANDING — After six months of relative peace in the waters off the Central Coast, sea otters are being threatened by the return of the weekend boating and water recreation crowds.
While many activities are still restricted due to COVID-19, fishing, kayaking and paddle boarding are not. Seeking respite from a summer of lockdown, tourists have been flocking to the coast. Since the reopening of marine recreation businesses in late May, the waters off places such as Moss Landing and Cannery Row have become busy again. This is putting a strain on the local wildlife, especially for Monterey’s favorite furry friends.
“Sea otters, among marine mammals, are especially vulnerable to human disturbance,” said Gena Bentall, director and senior scientist with Sea Otter Savvy. “What we’re talking about in this case is mainly recreational activities where people get too close.”
Sea otters may be North America’s smallest marine mammal, but they play a huge role in the coastal ecosystems they call home. By eating sea urchins in kelp forests and crabs in estuaries, sea otters help keep these ecosystems in balance. Because of the critical and outsized influence, they have on their environments, sea otters are considered a keystone species. Sea Otter Savvy calls them ecosystem “superheroes.”
Tracking sea otters
Since 2015, Sea Otter Savvy has had a team of volunteer community scientists collecting data at seven different sites along the Central Coast, but the pandemic has put that on pause.
“We have been in suspended animation since March, as so many people have, because our teams are voluntary and they haven’t been able to go out due to the COVID-19 situation,” said Bentall.
With no hard data to go by, Bentall and her team have been relying on time-lapse videos of the waterways and anecdotal evidence like phone calls from concerned bystanders.
(View a time-lapse video of change in traffic in Elkhorn Slough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG1zWsV9wfw&feature=youtu.be)
“I was getting daily reports from the public, people going crazy on jetskis – it was essentially mayhem,” said Bentall of the scene at Elkhorn Slough on a typical pandemic weekend.
All over the country, kayak and paddleboard shops are seeing record sales. In Monterey, where marine recreation businesses began reopening in late May, paddle shops, like Monterey Bay Kayaks, have been consistently selling out of rentals and equipment.
“We’re getting a lot of people who normally might not be going kayaking,” said Cass Schrock, owner of Monterey Bay Kayaks. Customers have “heard about the sea otters at Elkhorn Slough but really don’t know anything about the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary. We’ve got a whole new demographic we’re dealing with … People are definitely looking for something to do.”
At shops that are doing rentals, employees are working hard to teach people to be mindful of wildlife. “We’re doing a lot more education,” said Schrock. “We have information on our website, waivers we send beforehand that say ‘I will not get close to the sea otters or harass them,’ that kind of thing. When they check-in and do our orientation in person, we also cover, among safety factors, how to approach sea otters and watch their behavior. And then, of course, there’s signage everywhere.”
That being said, “a few people do still sneak by,” and if they’re caught harassing federally-protected otters, Schrock has no qualms about reporting them to the authorities.
There are also issues with private boaters, Schrock said – “people who bring their own boats, don’t check in with us, don’t look at the signs.” Monterey Bay Kayaks is working with Sea Otter Savvy and other organizations to fill in the education gap so that everyone on the water knows how to respectfully share the space.
Many local paddle shops like Monterey Bay Kayaks are certified through Sea Otter Savvy’s Community Active Wildlife Stewards program, designed to educate the public and encourage responsible behavior around wildlife. “But at a certain point,” said Bentall, “it doesn’t matter how good the training is if there’s no room to keep a distance.”
Keeping your distance
People often paddle out in places like Elkhorn Slough because they love otters, said Bentall, so if they don’t know any better, they often get too close. While getting close to an actively foraging otter is a stressful disturbance for the animal, what’s worse is when people wake them. Energetically speaking, sea otters live paycheck to paycheck.
“Sea otters are just really special in that regard,” said Andy Johnson, a California representative with Defenders of Wildlife. “There’s such a fine line in their ability to take in enough energy. They’ve got to rest a lot, they have to keep their fur in shape, they’ve got to eat a lot. Those extra disturbances tend to push them into a deficit that they sometimes can’t recover from.”
Unlike other marine mammals, sea otters lack a blubber layer, which means they have to use up significant energy just to stay warm. Resting allows them to conserve just enough energy to forage for food later, which in turn will give them just enough energy to do that again the next day.
Disturbances can be especially harmful in hotspots like Cannery Row whose population is near carrying capacity. That means there are just enough resources to support the current population. Because otters are their own biggest competition for food, emaciation is a real danger. This is even more true for female sea otters, as seen in a recent study in which more than 50% of females necropsied had signs of emaciation.
“It’s great to get out, we need to get out, but we really need to view wildlife responsibly,” said Johnson. The key areas of paddlers overlapping otters are Moss Landing, Elkhorn Slough and off Cannery Row. In these hotspots, said Johnson, there are “omnipresent opportunities for disturbance.”
Luckily, there are ways to paddle responsibly. Detailed guidelines can be found on Sea Otter Savvy’s website, but the key idea is to give otters space.
“When you watch the same otter every day, it really starts to be apparent how individual they are,” said Bentall. “They definitely have very distinct personalities that you can easily recognize even from afar. They have different ways of being parents, mothers, more social animals and more introverted-seeming animals. They’re individuals just like human beings.”
The Link LonkOctober 17, 2020 at 08:39PM
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Interacting with sea otters: Welcome back, but please keep your distance - Monterey Herald
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