(gentle music)
- I have a lot of respect for sea otters.
They're in this super cold water without a blubber layer.
They're doing all this just with hair.
It's pretty amazing that they can keep that up.
And to keep that up, of course,
they have to eat quite a lot.
- And they're so important to the ecosystem.
One thing that I think people don't really understand
about them is that they've been extinct in Oregon
since the early 1900s.
- The reason that there's no sea otters in Oregon
is that they were all hunted out.
We don't know what it really would look like naturally.
Everything we see is the result of over 100 years
of one of the most important predators not being here.
For people that have never been in a kelp forest before,
it's pretty magical, it's kind of like the first time
that you've ever been into the redwoods.
There'll be these large canopy-forming kelps
that make it to the surface.
There'll be an understory,
which is similar to the bushes that you see in a forest.
They support a lot of the fish
that people really care about, so rockfish, and salmon,
they bring in little nice and shrimp,
and that brings in gray whales.
These kelp forests support everything
from the smallest invertebrates
to the biggest vertebrates on our coast.
(water rushing)
- My name is Dave Lacey,
and I own and operate a guided outfitter business
here on the south coast.
We do whales and wildlife boat tours out of Port Orford.
We also do some fishing, and some kayaking,
scuba diving, and snorkeling.
People are pretty fascinated
when we get to go in the kelp forest.
You can pull up and just sit and enjoy the stillness.
You can find all kinds of cool stuff
that's like hiding in the fronds of the kelp.
About 75% of Oregon's kelp forests are on the south coast,
where most of the rocky reef habitat is,
and that's what kelp needs to grab onto.
It needs to hold onto something solid like rock.
Five years ago in certain places
like Nellies Cove in Port Orford,
you would see a healthy kelp forest
with all kinds of wildlife teaming in it,
and around it, and above it.
Now you go there and it's basically an urchin barren.
- A sea urchin barren, it's barren in the sense
that there's nothing else besides sea urchins.
There's just so many purple sea urchins,
which are herbivores, eating the kelp,
that the new kelp has a really hard time establishing.
Here in Oregon, we no longer have the major predators
that would have affected kelp forests
through their suppression of urchins.
There's a pretty large area in the Port Orford Bay
that had kelp forests there
that haven't had those for awhile,
plus there's high densities of purple urchins.
Any place where there used to be a kelp forest
and it's been gone for five or six years,
that does start to be alarming.
- It was really drastic.
Our business is completely connected
to the health of the ecosystem here,
and to see it go away so fast,
I can't even express how concerned I am about it.
- In kelp forests where sea otters are present,
there's a lot less invertebrates out in the open,
because if they are out in the open,
the sea otters just eat them,
especially things like sea urchins.
One of the things that I work on in my own research is
how kelp forests support marine food webs.
Predators can eat the things that eat the kelp.
So if they do that,
that frees the kelp up from being eaten itself.
Sea otters won't wipe out all of the invertebrates
that they like to eat.
The things that they like to eat, like urchins, abalone,
evolved with them for thousands of years,
so they will hide in the cracks.
What's neat is that in a really well-functioning kelp forest
all of that kelp that's growing there will generate detritus
that falls down to the sea floor into those cracks
and still feeds the invertebrates that live there.
So predators have this indirect positive effect
on kelp forests.
There's now an effort led by the Elakha Alliance
to bring sea otters back to Oregon.
- Nobody alive today has ever seen
what our ecosystem looks like with sea otters in it.
They used to be here for thousands of years.
The native people had this relationship with the sea otter.
I think it's time to look at bringing them back
and seeing what they can do
to help make the balance the way it should be.
And I think we need to be very careful
and include other stakeholders' input,
and really, I do care about my commercial fishermen friends,
and I want to make sure
that their bottom line isn't affected.
- Otters will eat Dungeness crabs, so it's understandable
that commercial fishers would be concerned about that.
One thing to keep in mind about reintroducing sea otters
to Oregon is that wherever that re-introduction occurs,
those otters are likely going to stay in that area.
They're going to move a little bit,
but they're not going to spread like wildfire
across all parts of Oregon.
I think that they'll benefit our kelp forests,
which will actually benefit our fisheries too.
It'll drive quite a lot of tourism.
Every place that people have re-introduced sea otters
to their rightful range,
so Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, California,
amazing science has come out of that.
People have studied how the communities respond
to this important predator.
And so I want to see that happen in Oregon.
- All of Oregon should care about this issue
because the beach is yours.
It's a public beach, all of Oregonians have this,
and we take care of it
so that anyone can come here and check it out.
And I think it would be really nice
if the sea otters were there to greet you.
(peaceful music)