While juvenile otters wrestle along the surface of the Pacific Ocean, intertwining in a scrimmage of mating tussles to come, a fuzzy pup steals a mama otter’s clam, mid-crack, before she has a chance to share.
Nearby, other otters float on their backs, easily reclining in a way that contrasts abruptly with the violent smashing of crabs on their bellies.
And as harbor seals lounge unmoving on the shore, still more ever-active otters dive below the glittering bay for long intervals—swooping around the depths for clams, snails, urchins, abalone, mussels, and fat innkeeper worms—surfacing after a half minute, several hundred feet away from where they disappeared.
It’s a mild summer afternoon on Elkhorn Slough, California, and the otters are everywhere.
From the flat deck of an all-electric catamaran that moves like a whisper, a dozen locals and tourists pop and squeak with “Oh my gosh!,” “Whoa!,” and “Look at that!”
Captain and Monterey Bay Eco Tours co-owner Wendy Kitchell is familiar with the response and knows it personally. She often steers El Cat, which she built with her brother for low-impact, high-convenience, and high-frequency otter sightings.
“The first time visitors see the otters, they all jump up,” she said. “Then, by the end, there’s so many otters, they’ve fulfilled every expectation, and it’s, ‘Oh, another otter.’”
The otter prosperity grows more striking with historical context.
For one, the southern sea otter was far from thriving fewer than 100 years ago.
The entire species was believed to have been hunted to extinction in the early 1900s by fur traders for their lush pelts, before a small and distant population of 50 sea otters was spotted along the jagged and steep Big Sur coast, at the mouth of the river that now runs under Bixby Bridge.
On top of that, even as the southern sea otter population along the Central Californian coast has started to revive, representing the vast majority of the West Coast population of 3,000—and otters became ubiquitous mascots for the region—they remained unseen in at least one important way.
That shifted with a study that was published last year but whose results will radiate for the foreseeable future.
“The Economic Value of Sea Otters and Recreational Tourism in a California Estuary” was co-crafted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Center for the Blue Economy (CBE) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.
The world-famous aquarium sought out CBE because it specializes in generating open-access data, research, and analysis to uplift ocean health—in its mission’s parlance, the center “leads the effort to measure the economic contributions of oceans and coastlines at the local, regional, state, national, and international levels.”
Put differently, CBE’s charge is to define the often dramatic—and long overlooked—upsides of oceanic conservation, in hard numbers. That can mean how much money vibrant wetlands in the Pacific Northwest save in disaster relief and loss prevention, and how much coastal resources contribute to economies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Center director and Middlebury professor Jason Scorse noted that the center’s guiding philosophy syncs with his own—“My life is dedicated to helping humanity chart a more sustainable and ethical arc, and that’s what MIIS is all about”—and with the “otternomics” investigation.
“We’re in a money-driven world where we see things the market picks up—and not necessarily the values of being a human and the other things we care about,” he said. “Otters are good for the ecosystem, fisheries, and tourism, and tourists bring money. Once you shine a light on it, people get it real quick.”
Then aquarium head scientist Kyle Van Houtan codesigned the study with CBE director of research Dr. Charles Colgan. After the study was published, Colgan provided additional perspective.
“The main point from the study was not so much the dollar value, though that’s always helpful to know,” he said, “but how the restoration of a species, once abundant, then largely extirpated, now is back and has great economic impact that increases the value of a popular recreational opportunity.”
And that opportunity, in turn, allows for a whole new raft of possibilities for ocean wellness, beyond the otter excitement in the slough.
NEARLY GONE
The near-death experience of her first otter orphan still sticks with Jessica Fujii.
Fujii is the aquarium’s Sea Otter Program (SOP) lead, overseeing the research, rehabilitation, and surrogacy of southern sea otters.
She was out along the craggy coastline of Pebble Beach, looking for a tagged adult otter, when she heard the pup’s piercing cries. She tracked them to the source and found a two-week-old baby otter trapped between steep rocks, getting smacked and smacked again by the surf.
By the time the SOP rescue team arrived, the young pup was, per Fujii, “very cold” and “had swallowed a lot of sea water,” but, she added, “was still fighting,” even as the pup’s fatigue gradually quieted her cries.
“The years I’ve been able to spend watching and studying sea otters in the wild has really given me a deep appreciation for the challenges sea otters face every day,” she said.
That mission and its ensuing stages work as a microcosm for the aquarium’s Sea Otter Program, which launched shortly after the nonprofit’s debut in 1984.
Forty years later, the SOP continues to contribute mightily to global marine mammal science. It measures the success of rehabilitation, adoptive parenting, and habitat restoration; monitors populations and behavior; and has rescued 1,000 otters since its start.
The female pup was nursed by staff and volunteers, introduced to a surrogate sea otter mother, and eventually released into Elkhorn Slough, where she would birth pups of her own and help heal a water body that was itself recovering.
“Knowing that this otter got another chance to survive in the wild and therefore was able to indirectly contribute to the health of the estuary ecosystem—and how people have come to appreciate visiting Elkhorn Slough—is incredibly rewarding,” Fujii said.
These days Fujii’s duties include less fieldwork, as her schedule overflows with staff support, research collaboration, ecosystem studies, and policy advocacy. Her work also involves regularly renewed admiration for otter abilities—their gift for shell-busting tools tops her list—and other tasks she thinks outsiders might not expect.
“As much as people love the idea of being able to work directly with sea otters,” she said, “they may be surprised by how much cleaning is involved every day, from doing laundry to cleaning food dishes and otter pools.”
But she didn’t think her duties would include an otter-depth dive on economics. (Southern sea otters can go 250 feet down and remain submerged for five minutes.)
“My career has been focused on sea otter ecology, so this research was a new direction for me,” she said, “and a great opportunity to collaborate with and learn from experienced economists.”
Van Houtan assigned Fujii to the project. The inspiration behind that emerged organically from the surrogacy work that had become a focal point for both of them.
The aquarium’s nonprofit mission is “to inspire conservation of the ocean” and folds in a planetary amount of scientific work and advocacy. Their SOP team was in the midst of documenting the success of mama otters like Rosa, their first mother otter and a rescue herself, who would go on to teach 15 younger versions of her how to dive, forage, and groom.
“Our hope was to deploy surrogacy as part of a reintroduction program to help restore sea otter populations to regions of their historic population range where they had been extirpated and are currently absent,” Van Houtan said.
That years-long—and ongoing—effort led to a meeting with federal fishery managers. The enthusiasm for Van Houtan’s presentation was real, and incomplete: One of the officials stated the current administration would be into surrogacy-based reintroduction only as long as there were no anticipated economic costs.
“We left the meeting with our marching orders,” Van Houtan remembered. “We had to not only document the benefits of sea otter reintroduction for the sake of the sea otters themselves—and for the ecosystems where they reside—we also had to investigate the potential economic impacts of recovering sea otter populations on the West Coast.”
SEEN AND UNSEEN
It’s feeding time on a Sunday at Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sea otter exhibit.
Early afternoon sunlight prisms through the open top of the two-story land-and-sea tank, which sits at the center of the former cannery’s main hall, next to the entrance, through which two million humans flow every year.
The audience, which started gathering 15 minutes ago, stacks eight people deep.
Zach Wright, an aquarium naturalist tucked in a back corner on the second story, uses his microphone to encourage the crowd to take a big step back so shorter humans can filter in for a line of sight.
As the late lunch session starts, the murmuring from the throng of onlookers, ages roughly 2 to 82, rises in at least four languages.
The mammalogists in the exhibit float out hollow dodecahedrons the size of beach balls to the three charismatic residents, Ivy, Selka, and Ruby.
With fresh shrimp and shellfish stashed inside, the geometric shapes work like larger and trickier Kong toys that demand the type of problem solving otters must deploy to thrive in the wild.
Meanwhile, narrator Wright riffs on otter uniqueness: At one million hairs per square inch, they have the thickest fur on the planet. They hunt and eat a fourth of their body weight daily. They serve as a “keystone species” that keeps thriving coastal ecosystems in balance.
He doesn’t mention any economic benefits.
Then, despite his mic’s might, he’s interrupted by Ruby, the exhibit’s youngest otter. Suddenly she’s tomahawk-smacking her golden yellow geometric shape against the tank’s acrylic window, like she would a clam or crab against a rock out in Monterey Bay.
The visceral reaction washes across the crowd, making ripples along the way: vowel sounds, involuntary giggles, giddy grins, gentle pandemonium.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
The vibe across Monterey Bay, at another nature-based destination, differs dramatically from feeding time.
A meditational calm occupies the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, where picnic benches flank the airy and welcoming visitor center and its banks of feathers, fossils, and interactive exhibits.
It’s a place where five miles of trails tread wild terrain spanning 1,700 acres of salt marsh, woodlands, and grasslands teeming with wildlife, including 340 species of birds, among them sandpipers, willets, plovers, geese, and peregrine falcons.
It’s a place where boatloads of marine and ecosystems research is conducted, including habitat restoration, marsh sustainability, and water quality monitoring, by a block party of expert-laden agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Elkhorn Slough Foundation, with assists from the University of California, Santa Cruz and California State University, Monterey Bay.
And it’s a place few of those tourists crowding around the aquarium exhibit ever think of visiting to see otters in the wild. (And as it turns out, the 30,000 annual visitors are largely researchers, students, birdwatchers, and nature enthusiasts.)
Anthony Castelletto, a staff researcher at the Middlebury Institute and the Center for Blue Economy, moves through the reserve’s visitor center on a recent autumn morning.
He passes various interpretive panels displaying sea otter fun facts, which run from the more entertaining—their fur has an armpit pouch to stash food—to the more foundational.
“Sea otters are a keystone species in estuaries, affecting eelgrass beds through a complex food chain,” one reads. “The eelgrass requires small grazers, like sea slugs, to keep algae from growing on it. Sea slugs are prey for crabs, and if there are too many crabs present, there are no grazers to protect the eelgrass. When sea otters enter an estuary, they eat the crabs, keeping their population in check and giving eelgrass beds an upper hand!”
The subtext feels appropriately invisible: robust residential otter populations have plenty of hard-to-observe effects, including the carbon sequestration furnished by eelgrass and the kelp forest habitat the otters steward.
As Castelletto wanders past the oversized renderings of Elkhorn Slough’s resident fauna—like the huge red-shouldered hawk’s claw coming through the ceiling and the four-foot-long innkeeper worm hiding in its tubular burrow—he pauses to consider the arching skeleton of a full-sized male southern sea otter.
“You can’t legally buy or sell a sea otter,” he says. “But you can measure if people will go out of their way to see one. And you can always translate effort to dollars and cents, which is critical for protecting the environment, as leaders making decisions always get down to dollars and cents.”
Later, he elaborates.
“Giving the priceless a price lets us better understand the trade-offs in labor and money we need to protect the environment,” Castelletto says.
He joined alumni from several Middlebury Institute master’s programs—Jeremy Ginsberg and Chiao Ting, International Environmental Policy; Josh Bryan, International Policy and Development; and Conner Freeman, Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies—in gathering the interviews that made the study possible.
They dispersed themselves across little Moss Landing—official census population, nine, otter-crossing street signs, two—and Elkhorn Slough, interviewing visitors about why they came, where they stayed, what they spent, and whether they’d seen otters.
At times they traversed docks and the eco tour off-loading ramp; at others they stationed themselves at the visitor center, in harbor parking lots, and at kayak rental shops, their surveys unfurling 60 questions of varying specificity.
A few examples: 1) “Have you been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey?” 2) “About how much will you spend in the Monterey Bay area today other than on meals and transportation?” and 3) “Assuring continuation of habitat, clean water, and food supply for the otters is critical. Would you pay an additional fee of $10 specifically to assure that the sea otter population stays about the same into the future?”
Castelletto—who coauthored the study and majored in public policy because he wanted to give scientific knowledge greater traction—was surprised by how “generous people were in their willingness to pay.”
“People were very willing to open their wallets in order to protect the environment in terms of [prospective] usage fees,” he says. “They always went over what I thought they would answer.”
He was not caught off-guard by the quantity of rich statistics they’d have to collect.
“One of the secrets of environmental economics is that you have to consume massive amounts of data,” he says. “I call it ‘translational’: translate environmental data like sea level rise or coral reef health into social data like economic values, asking, ‘What’s this worth to you? What will you do to preserve it?’”
The study ultimately found that each year visitors contribute approximately $3.2 million in direct spending, plus another $1.85 million in indirect funds, which provides more than 300 full-time, part-time, and seasonal jobs to the region.
“Whether sea otters were observed during a trip influenced how visitors ranked their importance, and the perceived value of the estuary and sea otters,” the study concluded. “Combined, this study quantified what recreational visitors could contribute to local economies and determined that sea otters play a role in what visitors valued about their visit.”
As the relatively tranquil Elkhorn Slough generates that sort of economic windfall, it hints at what numbers might explode with studies conducted on the more famous otter side of Monterey Bay—or in other potential wild release locations currently under consideration, namely San Francisco and Morro Bays.
That’s the thing about all those otters living their best estuary lives. The buffet of mussels and innkeeper worms is all-you-can-eat, but not infinite. That happy Elkhorn Slough population is doing so well it’s reached its limit for what prey can sustainably support.
ONGOING EVOLUTION
It’s hard to enjoy a higher profile than otters do around Monterey Bay.
They’re on sweatshirts and bumper stickers. They appear in shops as stuffed animals, keychains, and magnets, and center stage in fine art photographs and scientific illustrations. They’re all over business signs and websites like See Monterey and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Which all ups the irony that the wider relevance of otters has remained low-key.
But that, CBE director Scorse reminds those interested in protecting the coast, is what the Center for Blue Economy is here for. “Work like this is making the invisible visible,” he said.
Now, as Sea Otter Program leadership, including Jessica Fujii, look to San Francisco Bay and Morro Bay as new homes for rehabbed and surrogate-raised otters, they are better armed with data to inform management.
“Exploring the economic value of sea otters can put measurements in terms that more people understand, and that they may feel more directly impact them,” she said. “And hopefully once that bridge is built, they can also understand and appreciate the other benefits and values sea otters provide that may be harder to assign monetary value to.”
Van Houtan pointed out that the economic findings pair well with previous research on how sustainable otter presence enhances ecosystem well-being, which in turn aids fishermen, including crabbers, who might resist perceived competition that wasn’t there before.
“You don’t have to choose between a robust economy and robust ecosystems,” he said. “You can have both, and many studies suggest that they’re actually linked. Though there are other good case studies, sea otters provide a great example of documented dual ecological and economic benefits.”
Then he zoomed out a little further.
“When wild ecosystems thrive, so do people, and when wild ecosystems suffer, this also impacts human populations,” he said. “It’s an old story, but one we need to be reminded of again and again, today.”
Homing back in on otters—and what we might miss without them—Van Houtan didn’t refer to the millions of dollars lost in local revenues and job positions if otters, and the ecosystems they keystone, were compromised.
Instead, he paused before replying.
“This is a big question,” he messaged after taking a moment. “Earthworms, bees, corals, trees, otters, sharks, and many other species all make the planet more habitable for us, for our species. Yet these creatures are seemingly naïve to that fact.
“We, of course, are not. Collaborations and studies like this one help us see more clearly how we are sustained by wild, thriving nature.”
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