On Declining Sea Otter Populations in Alaska etc.

Sea Otter Populations in AlaskaThat news item on the decline of sea otter numbers in Alaska floated around in the news a few years ago. It was a peripheral item I wondered about and never got a conclusive answer for if such exists. In the 2008 book 'Where the Wild Things Went' there is a chapter at least partially explaining the phenomena.

I have had my own theories of course. Since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and later collapse of the Prince William Sound herring fishery, and continuing, persistent oil below the gravel of the beaches and probably in piles in the deep waters I believed that the entire trophic food chain was adversely impacted. Stolzenburger's book provides better insight than just that. It has provided some material I can use in forming my new understanding of several issues in Alaska.

Long before the oil spill researchers and had studied predator-prey relationships in the oceans and the Aleutian islands. Sea otter eat sea urchins that decimate kelp beds.

Without sea otters sea urchins wipe out kelp beds that provide life support for a variety of sea life and fish. Sea otters are necessary for a good fisheries.

Killer whales eat sea otters in large numbers now because they are an intelligent, adaptive species, and also because their traditional foods such as stellar sea lion, whales and healthy fish populations have been decimated.

It isn't so bad that some sea otters are eaten by k. whales, yet too many dead otters let the sea urchin eat the kelp like goats eating grass down to the root. The entire food chain dislocation is theorized to have started with mechanical whaling in the early 20th century that killed a half million larger whales that k. whales preferred for the main course of their diet.

Large numbers of large whales let the entire food chain occupy a more balanced niche without domination by any one species. Sure humans killed the whales and radically overfish the available remaining fish, the salmon fishery in Alaska rivers like the Kuskokwim, Yukon and Susitna is a pale shadow of its former robust health. Russian promyshleniki exterminated the stellar sea cow and a vast prospective copper mine may leach heavy metals into Bristol Bay for hundreds or thousands of years-it is not just one particular element of the ocean ecology that is out of balance-human technical supremacy has devastated the ranks of normal marine trophic relationships that kept natural balances intact.

The long downward slope even through mariculture farming toward destruction of oceanic bio-diversity will be increasingly difficult to recover from in the decades and centuries ahead. Especially as presently Alaska State politics is corrupted by global extraction industry powers and natural resource management policy develop discognizant of biodiversity conservation methods required for recovering a vibrant marine ecosystem in Alaska.

Killer whales evidently are shot by boaters and others with no respect for life on Earth. A shoreline road from Juneau to a mine north of Juneau would let plinkers have new access for shooting whales of a few kinds.

Restoration of North Pacific whale numbers and an increasing resident fish population would let the entire food chain become a little healthier. For numbers of fish to increase overall it is probable that simultaneous management of all north Pacific species must occur as the balances amidst the species is as important to a particular species as vertical human predation quantitative harvest decisions on any particular specie.