Instead, the team recommended allowing the main population to expand naturally along the southern coast. To the consternation of the shellfish industry, that s just what is happening now. The main population has been expanding steadily along the coast and, as of January 1999, about 150 otters have moved south into the former no-otter zone. The Santa Barbara-based California Seafood Council warns that reneging on this deal will further erode trust in government, and some fear that this could sour efforts to reintroduce predators elsewhere. For one thing, moving otters out of the zone probably wouldn t do any good.
Biologists now know that moving sea otters is usually a waste of time.
We shouldn t move them because many of them will just come back. More important, moving sea otters from the no-otter zone could harm the species chances of survival. After a decade of steady growth, the California sea otter has declined for four years in a row. The spring count has dropped 12 percent, from nearly 2,400 in 1995 to fewer than 2,100 in 1999. Biologists fear that maintaining the no-otter zone would jeopardize the species further.