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Article: Who's been eating all those sea otters?(killer whales eating Aleutian Island otters)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- October 17, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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At first, the researchers themselves couldn't quite believe their prime suspect in the case of the missing sea otters.
Killer whales have shared the Aleutian Islands with the otters for millennia, but a group of scientists now charges that the whales have lost so much of their usual prey that they're switching to otters and devastating the population.
"I can't imagine anticipating this would happen," says James Estes of the U.S. Geological Survey. Yet in the October 16 SCIENCE, he and his colleagues propose that the relatively rare killer whales, perhaps only 150 in the region, have driven otter numbers from some 53,000 to only 6,000 in less than a ...