You Otter Be Nice To Me--I'm Endangered!

He has an octopus in his paws that the seagull wants.  Photo taken by Trice. 

Damn James Michener!!  I'm at the end of up our terrific trip the the 49th state.   I’m happy with my clammin’ and I’ve got whale tales to tell, but now I’m struggling to hide my horrified reaction to his description of the hunting of the sea otter. There are hot tears in my eyes, my chest is tight with a held-in sob and I'm aboard flight #6750 from Anchorage to Seattle sitting in-between strangers.  Page 167 of Michener's 1988 tome Alaska--DON’T read it!  Don’t read it--even if you are a fur-coat loving, cold-hearted, unethical savage killer; it will break you.  Don’t read it--it will set you back decades; into the Cold War days of hateful fearing of Russia’s vicious ways.

Page 100 and his introduction of the otter to us is nice however: 

Thus the men of Lapak [fictional island] made their acquaintance with the fabled sea otter, a creature much like a small seal, for it was built similarly and swam in much the same way.  This first one was about five feet long, beautifully tapered and obviously at ease in the icy waters.  But what had made Azazruk gasp, and others too when they saw the creature, was its face because it resembled precisely the face of a bewhiskered old man, one who had enjoyed life and aged gracefully.  There was the wrinkled brow, the bloodshot eye, the nose, the smiling lips and, strangest of all, the wispy untended mustache.

...Azazruk knew it intuitively that it was special, but what happened next convinced him...that they had come upon a rare sea animal:  trailing along behind the first otter came a mother, floating easily on her back like a relaxed bather taking the sun in a quiet pool, while on her stomach protruding above the wave perched a baby otter, taking its ease too and idly surveying the world.

So back in the days of Peter the Great (around the mid-1700s) the Russians voyaged east of Siberia to explore and subsequently began the very lucrative and long-lasting trading of fur from the Aleutian Islands. According to Michener and others, the native Aleuts, like Azazruk, were forced to find, chase, wear out, and then bludgeon-to-death hundreds of thousands of sea otters because of their amazingly beautiful warm dense fur.  (Sea otters have the thickest fur of all earth’s creatures--up to one million hairs per square inch!) They have no blubber, you see, so they need all this fur, which they are constantly grooming and fluffing and oiling up, to stay warm in the frigid arctic waters.

Many other countries over time joined in the slaughter and fur trade of sea otters leading to their near extinction about 100 years ago. Finally, in 1911, treaties were signed that prohibited the big international fur companies from killing them and the sea otter was placed on the endangered species list.

This explains that while there were hundreds, make that thousands, of pelts at the Alaskan Raw Fur Company store that we visited in Fairbanks, I could not locate a sea otter pelt (just looking out of curiosity, mind you). There was wolf, wild fox, wolverine, weasel, beaver, lynx, and you can get the dark chocolate fur of a river otter for around $100-$200, (in case you are wondering), but blessedly no sea otter.

Another remarkable feature about about the sea otter is it one of the few mammals that uses “tools”.  Michener described it thus:

The hunters were staring at something even more extraordinary, for trailing behind the first two otters came an older fellow, also floating on his back, and what he was doing was unbelievable.  Perched securely on his ample belly lay a large rock, and as it rested there, held in place by his belly muscles, he used his two front paws as hands, and with them he slammed down upon the rock clams and other similar sea creatures, knocking them repeatedly until their shells broke so that he could pick out their meat and stuff it into his smiling mouth.

Cute and smart and, it turns out, the sea otters is also a classic example of what is called a "keystone species." This means that their presence in an ecosystem affects the environment more profoundly than one would suspect based on their numbers. Apparently they eat a lot, I mean A LOT, of little sea creatures like sea urchins and such. Again, because they are blubber-less, they have little fat reserves to fall back on and have to eat all the time to keep themselves warm. Turns out, if there aren't enough otters there are too many urchins. Too many sea urchins and the kelp forests are depleted.  No kelp means loss of habitat and nutrients for scads of marine species.

They hold paws to keep from drifting apart!

On the one soft little otter paw, due to the protective measures taken over the years the sea otter population is back up, not yet to pre-tzarist Russian days, but numbering into the tens of thousands again. On the other soft little otter paw, other man-made problems such as oil spills, water pollution, and conflict with fishermen continue to effect their numbers to the degree that they are still considered endangered. Orcas are a main predator and are eating more otters than ever because apparently something in their diet has gone awry. Also, those pesky bald eagles are known to swoop down and steal the pups from time to time. This image almost leads me to tears again!

Michener puts a pretty harsh light on the Russians in his book Alaska. The Russians were not only hard on the otter population they were also brutal to the Aleut people, enslaving them and narrowing their population too with disease and deprivation. I'm on page 254 now and I think the Aleuts are preparing to get their revenge on those debauched sailors and unethical traders. Thank goodness, at least for the now, the sea otters have also gotten their revenge in their own little, sweet-faced, soft-pawed, brilliant, beautiful way.