Sea Otter Awareness Week

Get ready to celebrate Sea Otter Awareness Week during the last full week of September. Sea otters are one of the few marine mammals that use tools, cracking open shellfish on rocks balanced on their chests, and they carry the densest fur of any mammal, with up to one million hairs per square inch.

This annual awareness week shines a light on a species that was hunted nearly to extinction during the Pacific maritime fur trade and has been slowly clawing its way back ever since. Sea otters are a keystone predator: by keeping sea urchin populations in check, they protect the kelp forests that shelter hundreds of marine species and absorb carbon dioxide.

Sea otters once numbered between 150,000 and 300,000 across the North Pacific, from northern Japan to Baja California. That changed in the 1740s, when the maritime fur trade turned their extraordinarily dense pelts into one of the most valuable commodities on the Pacific Rim. Russian, British, Spanish, and American traders hunted sea otters relentlessly for over a century, selling pelts in China for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars each. By the early 1900s, the worldwide population had collapsed to an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 animals scattered across 13 tiny remnant colonies.

The first major legal protection came with the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, an international treaty signed by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia that banned pelagic hunting of sea otters and fur seals. Recovery was slow. In California, a small surviving colony near Big Sur became publicly known in 1938, and from those roughly 50 animals, the southern sea otter population has gradually rebuilt. In 1977, the southern sea otter was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, citing its limited range and vulnerability to oil spills. Additional protections followed under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Sea Otter Awareness Week grew out of this long conservation effort. In 2003, Jim Curland, then Marine Program Associate at Defenders of Wildlife, began planning a coordinated public education campaign. Curland, who had earned a master's degree from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories studying human disturbance of southern sea otters, enlisted zoos, aquariums, educational institutions, and researchers. The last full week of September was chosen to align with the start of the school year. That first September 2003 event marked the beginning of what has become an annual multi-organization effort.

Over the following two decades, the week expanded far beyond California. Partner organizations now include Sea Otter Savvy, California Department of Parks and Recreation, the Elakha Alliance, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Events range from in-person viewing stations along the California coast to virtual webinars featuring leading sea otter researchers. In 2022, the California Legislature passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution 169, formally recognizing the 20th anniversary of Sea Otter Awareness Week. Curland, who has since moved on from Defenders, has called the week an "almost self-sustaining event" and expressed pride that many original partners still participate. The southern sea otter population today hovers around 3,000, still far below the roughly 16,000 that once inhabited California's coast.