In
Alaska there is a movement to kill off otters. Otters are blamed for
catching animals that humans want to catch and sell commercially.
Human reasoning goes that if one kills off a rival specie taking
one’s target game there will be more to catch and sell, and as
regards the sea and interior saltwater ecosystem that is entirely
wrong.
The
sea and salt water archipelago of Alaska is a complex ecosystem with
a web of complex relationships easily damaged. The naturalist W.O.
Wilson had a student that worked documenting some of the otter’s
effect on the ecosystem in the Aleutians on a particular island
described in the 2009 book
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wild-Things-Were-Ecological/dp/1596916249
Otters
eat echinoderms like starfish, sea urchins and other creatures.
Echinoderms eat kelp, and kelp provides habitat for numerous
fish-especially smaller ones. When the otters are killed nothing
checks echinoderm growth and the kelp beds are decimated at the
roots. Though sea urchins crabs and sea cucumbers are cash crops, otters
eat the echinoderms that decimate kelp beds and let small fish grow
larger. Humans just don't know how to manage marine life and destroy it with inevitable regularity.
The
trouble of course is the top predator in the marine ecosystem that
eats about everything else- human beings and fisher persons. They may
blame particular species, yet that really is a dope’s game. The
relationship is remarkably complex and there is no direct
relationship such that culling one species will create more of
another directly...it just doesn’t work that way. The marine
ecosystem isn’t like catching burglars to stop thieving.
I
have rowed a boat to Juneau from Wrangell a few times, and in the
1990s one could view numerous otters. In fact on the east side of
Wrangell there were several otter families that I haven’t seen
since maybe 2000. When I rowed to Juneau 1n 2013 I had to go all the
way past horn cliffs to see many sea otters...that’s a long way.
When
people eradicate otters there isn’t so much for killer whales to
eat since humans have already eradicated most of the king salmon and
diminished the size of other fish species. If one wanted to confirm
the fact that the problem is the way humans ‘manage’ the marine
ecosphere, all the would be necessary would be to put half of S.E.
Alaska off-limits to all commercial and sports fishing or any other
game activity for a decade and compare it after 10 years with the
half that was ‘managed’ by humans with intense commercial
harvesting...what a joke that would be!
