Sea otter awareness week

Sea otter awareness week starts on Sept. 22 and runs through Sept. 28. Here are 10 things to know about these fascinating ocean dwellers:

1. Sea otters are playful and adored for it, but they’re wild animals with a strong bite. Stay 5 kayak-lengths away.

2. Otters once lived from the Baja peninsula in Mexico all the way up to Alaska. In the 1800’s, fur hunting wiped them out in Washington, Oregon and most of California.

3. In California, a few otters escaped the fur hunters and settled along the central coast. Today they live from near Santa Barbara to near Santa Cruz.

4. Otters wrap themselves in kelp when sleeping in order to prevent the waves from floating them away. They do the same for their young.

5. The once-miniscule California population of otters has grown to about 3,000, bobbing above and below that number.

6. The southern sea otter remains on the endangered species list after a review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

7.  To stay warm, otters eat a lot, as much as a quarter of their body weight each day. Do the math for yourself: a 175 pound human would need to eat 44 pounds of food each day.

8. Otters were reintroduced in Washington and Oregon in 1969-70. The Washington reintroduction worked, but the otters did not stick in Oregon. To this day, otters stray down to Oregon but haven’t yet made it a permanent home.

9. The Fish and Wildlife Service conducted a feasibility study on reintroducing otters along the Oregon and Northern California coasts. It found that reintroduction “would lead to significant conservation benefits to the species… and to the nearshore marine ecosystem.”

10. How do otters help ecosystems? Otters eat urchins, and urchins chow down on kelp. Many species need kelp, including otters. Otters can help restore balance to marine ecosystems.

Happy sea otter awareness week. Let’s help sea otters thrive and restore them to the places along the Pacific coast where they were wiped out.