By the turn of the twentieth century there weren't enough otters left to sustain the commerce in their furs, and the sea otter holocaust ended by default. The Russians and Americans had laid waste to the entire range of the sea otter, from Japan to Baja California, having killed, skinned, and sold somewhere between a half-million and a million animals.
When the Sealing Convention went into effect in 1911, there were only one to two thousand otters still alive... Every otter-every single otter-that had inhabited today's Baja California, the state of California except for the small central coast population, and all of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Southeast Alaska was gone.
In the eastern Gulf of Alaska, it was not until the 1950's that fishermen and biologists began noticing otters in numbers again...
-from Steller's Island Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska
by Dean Littlepage
(A good read)
2 comments:
That is so sad that so many have died, it doesn't pay to have an attractive pelt of skin.
Hopefully if left alone the otter population will increase. :) xoxox
Dianne,
They have rebounded over time and are doing much better. At least as a culture it is becoming rather socially unacceptable to hunt animals to extinction, at least in the Western world...(for now anyway)
-Corby
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