To the editor:
In the past decade, Oregon’s European green crab population has exploded. This invasive species devastates our coastal and nearshore areas.
Green crabs prey on countless critters, such as oysters, snails, and juvenile fish, that call our ocean home. They also destabilize our shorelines by ripping apart the root systems of eelgrass meadows, which inhibits our coast’s ability to combat sea level rise. It’s clear this crab conundrum is a crisis – what if the solution to an invasive species is to reintroduce a native one?
Once abundant in Oregon, sea otters were hunted to the brink of extinction for their fuzzy pelts. Populations of Southern otters in California and Northern otters in Washington provide a conservation blueprint for Oregon’s unstable numbers of this marine mammal.
Like Oregon, spots in California have been plagued by green crabs. However, areas where otters live, such as a tidal estuary near Monterey Bay, have retained more eelgrass and substantially fewer invasive crabs.
Bringing back sea otters to our state would help restore our ecosystem to its natural order. If reintroduced, they’d bolster our coastal ecosystems from invaders like green crabs and make our ocean more resilient. There’s a lot of work to be done to conserve our ocean and our coast, and sea otters should play a part in that. Officials in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have the authority to bring otters back and must expedite their rulemaking to reintroduce them into their natural habitat.
— Ian Giancarlo/Portland
You want to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon to control green crab? Do you think sea otters know the difference between green crab and Dungeness crab? Absolutely not. You think green crabs and not Dungeness crab eat clams, mussels and small fish? Absolutely not. If you think sea otters are good for the ocean take a look at Kodiak Island where they use to have abundant Dungeness, clams, mussels and other variety of small crustaceans and now there’s hardly any Dungeness, barely any clams. So why would someone want to reintroduce sea otters here in Oregon to jeopardize our Dungeness fishery let alone the the clamming? Before you think about reintroducing something especially that is so devastating like sea otters maybe do some research where they are over abundant and have destroyed shell fish. Sea otters are very cute and fun to watch but they are the rodent of the ocean and eat everything and anything they can, reproduce very quickly and are very aggressive.
Thank you Ian for promoting the reintroduction of sea otter back to their native waters in Oregon! Yes, they do in fact eat green crab as documented in Monterey Bay, which is just an added bonus of their status as a keystone species in the kelp forest and estuarine ecosystems. Green crabs also eat juvenile Dungeness Crabs, so even more reason to try and decrease the green crab population through returning a natural predator. The good thing about Dungeness crab is that they have the ability to retreat to depths that sea otters can’t reach, which is where commercial crabbers fish for them in the first place. If people are comparing Alaska to Oregon, that’s like comparing oranges to avocados – it doesn’t make sense ecologically or geographically to compare the two in terms of sea otters. The enormous population of sea otters in Southeast Alaska and its impacts on local shellfisheries are the result of the nearly perfect conditions for sea otters there. A complex geography of islands, coves, rocks and inlets offers suitable habitat in almost every direction for a sea otter seeking new food resources, allowing for extremely rapid population growth. By contrast, the Oregon coast is more or less linear north to south, offering disconnected areas of suitable habitat along exposed coastal sections. The relatively rapid drop-off of the continental shelf means there is only a narrow strip of habitat along the coastline where depths are suitable for sea otters. Because of this habitat disparity, Oregon’s sea otter population will remain small compared to the population in Southeast Alaska. Also, sea otters do not reproduce quickly at all. Females have one pup a year, and population growth takes about a decade to see any significant growth. To learn more about efforts to reintroduce them back to Oregon – visit https://www.elakhaalliance.org/