By Neil Farrell~
A 15-minute documentary film on the controversy surrounding the federal government’s sea otter exclusion zone off Santa Barbara is available to view online.
Made by filmmaker, Alexander Mark Romanov, and his crew, the film explores the history and continuing controversy over a federal law that called for the Fish and Wildlife Service to exclude sea otters from the waters south of Point Conception, in all but a small area around San Nicholas Island.
The law was designed to protect a commercial fishery in urchins, abalone and lobsters, all of which are favorite meals for sea otters.
The film can be seen online at: httpss://vimeo.com/52140920. In an email exchange with Romanov and shared by local fisheries activist, Steve Rebuck, the filmmaker said the film might still need some final editing but for the most part was completed.
Rebuck, who is an outspoken critic of the F&WS’s efforts to abandon the exclusion zone, is one of several people interviewed in the film, including a couple of commercial divers, an environmentalist and the F&WS official in charge of the exclusion program.
The film has some fascinating underwater shots of the Santa Barbara Channel seafloor dotted with sea urchins and huge abalone; scenes of commercial divers in a kelp forest harvesting urchins; and lots of close up shots of frolicking otters on the surface, and foraging otters underwater. Scenes were filmed in Santa Barbara, Port San Luis, the Channel Islands and Morro Bay.
Proponents of the exclusion zone claim that within a short time, the urchin and abalone rich waters will be picked clean if otters are allowed to repopulate the Channel. Opponents say otters are part of the natural world and man must learn to live with them.
Among the examples used in the film is the Coho Anchorage off Point Conception, where underwater oil pipelines once hosted a thriving ecosystem covered with urchins and abalone.
The claim is that within 3 months of otters reaching the area the pipeline was a reduced to wasteland with little life left. Pictures show the seafloor littered with abalone shells baring the telltale signs of otter predation — large holes in the shells battered by rock tools wielded by otters.
The film comes after an appeals court recently reinstated a lawsuit brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of the California Sea Urchin Commission, The California Lobster and Trap Fishermen’s Association and Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, seeking to force the agency to obey the law and restart efforts to enforce the exclusion zone.
Initially, that effort succeed in relocating some 140 otters to San Nicholas Island but failed to establish a resident population, as the otters all swam off. The film also recounts the sea otters’ tragic history.
The Northern Pacific Coast — from Baja Mexico, north to Alaska, across the Aleutian Islands and over to Russia and Japan — was the historic range of sea otters. But fur trapping, mostly by the Russians, nearly wiped them all out.
The otters were thought extinct off California until a small herd of about 100 animals was discovered living off the Coast of Big Sur. From there, the otters have grown to nearly 3,000 off California but the recovery has stalled for several years. The film’s interviewees claim this is due to habitat limitations but sharks have also played a large part.
Though not discussed in the film, predation by great white sharks, particularly off the Central Coast, is recognized as a major reason the otters’ recovery has stalled.
Over the past several years — from Pismo Beach to Santa Cruz — sharks have attacked a huge number of otters. The sharks bite and kill but don’t eat them, apparently not finding the extremely furry mammals (otters have 1 million hairs per square inch) to their liking.
This issue is a major consternation for those trying to help the otters recover, as white sharks and sea otters share the wild ocean and both are protected species.
