Sea otter sighting on Oregon Coast inspires redoubled efforts for species' reintroduction

This beach looks so sculptural. I see a lot of... Chanel Hayson gets a lot of reports about sea otters on the Oregon coast. Wouldn't that be magical if I was like, there he is! Are there any out there? It's very, very rare that it's actually a sea otter. Oh. I don't see them. Hayson is the outreach director at the Alaka Alliance. Usually, they hang around the rocks. A group working to bring sea otters back to Oregon. When she heard reports of sea otters at Ecola State Park... Yeah. She responded like she always does. If you can get me a photo or video evidence, I can determine if it's a river otter, which 99% of the time it is. Her source hustled to grab some pictures, and... As soon as she sent that email over with a scope photo of a cute little furry face, I was like, that are... The next day, Hayson made a beeline for the coast, hiked out to the beach, and saw something remarkable. Lo and behold, there was actually two out there, which was mind-blowing because that was the first time that I've known of seeing two live sea otters out on the Oregon coast together, and I was like, there he is! Hayson's mind was blown because sea otters have been functionally extinct in Oregon for more than a century. The last Oregon sea otter that we've been able to find a record of in our research was killed 12 years before my grandfather was born. That's Peter Hatch, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, and Secretary of the Alaka Alliance. From time immemorial, sea otters have held tremendous cultural importance to tribes all along the Oregon coast. In our stories and traditions, they are seen as a relative, you know, and part of a web of interrelationships that are laid out in those stories. Sea otters were hunted sustainably by tribes, mostly for their fur. They're valued because it is the most, the softest, richest, most beautiful fur that exists in nature. But that changed when settlers moved into the area. From the 1700s on, all along this coast, you know, all the way up to Alaska for the commercial fur trade, which really exhausted their numbers, not just here, but on much of the West Coast. Sea otters have been successfully reintroduced in Alaska and Washington. The small population avoided extinction in Central California. But in Oregon, the coast has been without this keystone species since the early 1900s. But bringing back sea otters isn't just a vanity project. It's not just because they're cute, though they are, or because they're culturally important to indigenous people. The absence of sea otters has left an imbalance on Oregon's coast. They have a disproportionately large effect on the ecosystem based to their abundance, or relative to their abundance. And that's become more apparent than ever over the last decade. Starting in 2014, a wasting disease began wreaking havoc with sea stars all along the West Coast. It's about 99% of the whole population was decimated, and they haven't made a comeback. Sea stars are prolific predators of purple sea urchins. So when sea stars disappeared, the urchin population exploded. Without these top predators, sea urchins are overpopulating and overgrazing on kelp, which is basically the foundation for our underwater forests and home to thousands of species. That's left areas of the coast previously teeming with kelp forests barren, covered only by a carpet of purple sea urchins. And it's hard to overstate the importance of kelp forests to coastal ecosystems. So they're home to thousands of species of fish, invertebrates, marine mammals, from little harbor seals to big, enormous gray whales. Sea otters, if they were here, would have helped keep the urchin population in check. Part of our hope behind a reintroduction would be putting in place another backstop that really should always have been there. Correct. Now, Haston said there has been some hesitation from folks in the fishing and crabbing industries, but... We are working closely to have one-on-one conversations with these individuals and figure out what's the best way to, if there's any negative implications, how to work that through. So when might we actually have sea otters back in the water in Oregon? There are still several studies to complete and issues to iron out. But earlier this year, tribal leaders from the Confederated Tribes of Siletz and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians asked the Secretary of the Interior to prioritize the effort. They called upon the federal government to bring sea otters back within the next five years. And for Haston, the two sea otters spotted here last month were an inspiring glimpse of what could be. It was a magical, like, historical moment. And especially for me, as someone who's working very hard to restore our population, it was like a little glimmer of hope of exactly what we could see in the future here off of our coast. Kale joins me now. Okay, my first question, how do sea otters keep these urchins down? They eat them. It's pretty simple. You know, they are prolific predators of these things. There's one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite environmental authors, Rachel Carson, nothing in nature exists alone. And it's just sort of, this is like the perfect example of how nature sort of has a balance to itself. And when humans intervene, it can often upset that balance. And how would they create a new colony of sea otters off the Oregon coast? Another simple answer, they trap them, they bring them down, they release them. This is their natural habitat. They existed here for thousands of years up until the early 1900s. So it's pretty much just a matter of bringing them back, letting them do their thing. Wow, okay, let's do it. Thanks, Kale, appreciate it.