Commercial fishermen in Alaska say it is unfair to blame them. Pollock are still plentiful and they had never harvested the capelin and other smelt important to sea lions. But environmentalists argue that the huge trawling operations are now taking the only food left for the animals. The Aleutians are so unpredictable that scientists may never be able to unravel all the biological interactions and prove or disprove their theories about how the food web got tangled. But it's an unbelievably complicated place, and biology is not a very clean science.
Animals are like people.
There is never one factor at play. . . . Sometimes you poke along and poke along and all of a sudden, the pieces fall into place. Some experts say the ocean may be shifting back, favoring the marine mammals again instead of the sharks and pollock. If it does, Estes and his team will be there to chronicle it. But even if all the elements the forage fish, the otters, the sea lions, the kelp were to return, these islands will never be the same.