Saving Seafood

Alaska fishermen seek solutions as they grapple with the destructive appetites of sea otters

October 30, 2019 โ€” They may be cute, but the voracious appetites of sea otters continue to cause significant damage to some of Southeast Alaskaโ€™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.

โ€œAll of the people who have anything to do with the otters hopefully will all be in the same room at the same time,โ€ 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.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Alaska fishermen: Sea otter comeback is eating into profits

May 18, 2018 โ€” ANCHORAGE, Alaska โ€”  Northern sea otters, once hunted to the brink of extinction along Alaskaโ€™s Panhandle, have made a spectacular comeback by gobbling some of the stateโ€™s finest seafood โ€“ and fishermen are not happy about the competition.

Sea otters dive for red sea urchins, geoduck clams, sea cucumbers โ€“ delicacies in Asia markets โ€“ plus prized Dungeness crab. They then carry their meals to the surface and float on their backs as they eat, sometimes using rocks to crack open clams and crab. The furry marine mammals, which grow as large as 100 pounds (45 kilograms), eat the equivalent of a quarter of their weight each day.

Phil Doherty, head of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association, is working to save the livelihood of 200 southeast Alaska fishermen and a $10 million industry but faces an uphill struggle against an opponent that looks like a cuddly plush toy.

Fishermen have watched their harvest shrink as sea otters spread and colonize, Doherty said. Divers once annually harvested 6 million pounds (2.7 million kilograms) of red sea urchins. The recent quota has been less than 1 million pounds (454,000 kilograms).

โ€œWeโ€™ve seen a multimillion-dollar fishery in sea urchins pretty much go away,โ€ he said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WPXI