May 9, 2016 — PASADENA, Calif. — California’s shellfish industry fought the federal government’s termination of a “no-otter zone” along the Southern California coast at a Ninth Circuit hearing on Friday.
Four fishing industry groups sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in 2013, claiming its decision to end a long-disputed sea otter translocation program would “severely compromise if not destroy” shellfish and other marine fisheries on the southern coast.
Nixing the program would lead more than 300 sea otters to occupy a previously “otter-free zone” within 10 years and prey on the shellfish which fishermen depend on for their livelihood, the plaintiffs claimed in their 2013 complaint.
But environmental groups had long pushed for the government to end the program, claiming it was a disaster from the start and that it bowed to the interests of the oil and fishing industries.
The program relocated 140 sea otters to San Nicholas Island and established an otter-free zone south of Point Conception in Santa Barbara County, where fishermen harvest sea urchin, abalone and lobster.
Under the program, fishermen who accidentally killed otters in the zone could not be federally prosecuted, and the government was to use nonlethal means to capture any otters that wandered into the zone.