Sea Otters and the Kelp Forest
Near Monterey, California
Look into the kelp beds swaying just offshore and you may spot a sea otter floating on its back, cracking a shell against a rock on its belly. That it is here at all is a small miracle. Sea otters have the densest fur of any animal, and that fur nearly doomed them.
Fur hunters killed them by the hundreds of thousands, and by the early twentieth century the California sea otter was believed extinct. Then, in nineteen thirty eight, a small raft of about fifty otters was discovered clinging to the wild coast near Bixby Creek in Big Sur, hidden from hunters by the rugged shore. From that tiny remnant the population slowly returned.
Otters turn out to be a keystone of this whole ecosystem. They devour sea urchins, and without them the urchins multiply and mow down the giant kelp forests that shelter countless fish and other creatures. Scientists first fully grasped this role in the nineteen seventies, and the otter was listed as threatened in nineteen seventy seven.
Today a few thousand southern sea otters patrol the central coast, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium has rescued, treated and released nearly three hundred sea otters back into the wild.
