WP: Alaskan Sea Otter Listed as Threatened

[DeepModem Mom]

Alaskan Sea Otter Listed as Threatened
Population Drops Below 9,000

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 10, 2005; Page A03


Federal officials yesterday designated the southwest Alaska sea otter -- a species that teetered on the edge of extinction in the late 1800s -- as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, alarmed that its numbers have dipped sharply over the past 15 years.

Fur hunters nearly wiped out the otters, whose range stretches from Cook Inlet to the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island, by 1911, at which point the otters received international protection. By the mid- to late 1980s, as many as 74,000 otters thrived in Alaska's Aleutian Islands alone, but this number has now dropped to below 9,000.

Bruce Woods, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Alaska region, said government scientists are still searching for the reason the population has declined so quickly. Predatory orca whales may account for the drop, he said, but officials are still not sure. Sea otters on the Russian side of the Aleutian Islands are doing better than their American counterparts.

Environmentalists hailed the move, saying it is the otters' best chance of survival. Brent Plater, a lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity who sued the Interior Department in 2003 to list the species, called the agency's decision "a positive step toward sea otter conservation and recovery."...

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The new federal protection is not likely to incite controversy, Woods said, because commercial fishermen in the area do not target the sea otters' main source of food, sea urchins....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/09/AR2005080901286.html?sub=AR