Sea Otters

After 24 years of barring sea otters from most Southern California waters and trying to establish a colony for the animals on San Nicolas Island, federal wildlife officials say the effort should be abandoned because it failed to help the threatened species recover. A plan released Wednesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would allow southern sea otters to expand into their historic range off Southern California and officially end a relocation program long criticized as ineffective and harmful to the furry marine mammals.

Pity the poor sea otter. It's been a struggle for the furry, button-nosed critter to make a comeback since being hunted nearly to extinction along California's coast. They get chomped by great white sharks. They must scrounge in overexploited waters to find enough shellfish to eat. Their immune systems are weakened by polluted runoff and under attack by parasites that wash into coastal waters from the feces of domestic cats and opossums. Now it turns out that some of these playful marine mammals are also being poisoned by an ancient microbe — a type of cyanobacteria — that appears to be on an upsurge in warmer, polluted waters around the world.

Four years ago, when the giant oil company BP donated $1 million to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, the contribution seemed like a good deal for both an oil company trying to burnish its environmental credentials and a venue trying to draw more visitors. Then, last month, a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest oil spills in U.S. history. With the BP Sea Otter Habitat set to open this week, a potential feel-good moment has turned into a public relations landmine.

Olive, the oil-slicked sea otter who gained a fan club on Facebook after washing up on a Monterey Bay beach in February, has returned to the sea. She slid out of her cage into the waves at Sunset State Beach a week ago after six weeks of rehabilitation after being coated by a natural oil seep. Officials from the California Department of Fish and Game, who cared for the otter at their Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center in Santa Cruz, had nicknamed her Olive.

Training her binoculars on a dark patch of seaweed swaying in the shallows, Gena Bentall gasped. After searching for sea otters all day, the research biologist had spotted one: a mother with a pup on her belly, a mauled face dripping blood and a male pursuer hot on her tail. Female sea otters often have scars on their noses, the price of breeding with clumsy, sharp-toothed partners.

If Philippe Cousteau, a 27-year-old with a master's degree in history, were to describe his many multimedia conservation projects, he wouldn't choose the word "educational." "It sounds so pedantic and boring," he said. He'd prefer "compelling," "empowering," "cool" and "sexy." Adventuresome, for sure, but with an added dash of "poetry and philosophy." His grandfather, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and his father, Philippe Sr., left him a formidable legacy.

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It's sad to think that California's sea otters were once hunted to the brink of extinction, reduced to only 20 animals. Had hunters completely wiped out these endearing, furry little animals, I would not have had the pleasure of shaking hands with Charlie. Charlie, one of three southern sea otters being cared for at the Aquarium of the Pacific, was himself on the brink of extinction. On a cold winter night, shortly after his birth, he became separated from his mother.

After 18 years of failed attempts to keep sea otters out of most Southern California waters at the behest of fishermen, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday recommended abandoning the effort, saying the move would benefit the threatened species. The agency also called for ending a program to relocate sea otters from Monterey Bay to San Nicolas Island, 60 miles off the Southern California coast.