October 30, 2019 — They may be cute, but the voracious appetites of sea otters continue to cause significant damage to some of Southeast Alaska’s most lucrative fisheries.
How best to curtail those impacts will be the focus of a day long stakeholders meeting set for Nov. 6 in Juneau.
“All of the people who have anything to do with the otters hopefully will all be in the same room at the same time,” said Phil Doherty, co-director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association based in Ketchikan.
A 2011 report by the McDowell Group showed that otter predation on sea cucumbers, clams, urchins, crabs and other shellfish cost the Southeast economy nearly $30 million over 15 years. And their population has skyrocketed since then.