Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022Many marine mammal populations are currently recovering from population depletion after overharvest. As marine mammals are often important predators in shaping marine ecosystems, there is a need to understand the impacts of recovering populations on other species and the marine ecosystem as a whole. The depletion and subsequent recovery of these species presents biologists with natural experiments to study their ecology, including drivers of their population dynamics and the function of the species in the ecosystem. This dissertation focuses on the recovery of a translocated population of sea otters (Enhydra lutris kenyoni) in Washington State. The presence or absence of sea otters, a keystone species, can dramatically influence marine community structure. The overall aim of this dissertation was to utilize the natural experiment of sea otter translocation to Washington State to understand drivers of sea otter population dynamics as well as the ecological role that sea otters play in Washington State. In Chapter 2, my coauthors and I found that the sea otter population in Washington has grown from an estimated 21 adult sea otters in 1977 to 2,336 adult sea otters in 2019, and the population is predicted to continue to grow and expand primarily to the south of the current range over the next 25 years. We also estimated that Washington State can support twice as many sea otters than previously estimated (equilibrium abundance of 6,080 vs. 2,734 sea otters), and that estimates of mean equilibrium density in currently occupied areas had the largest impact on predictions of population growth and range expansion. In Chapter 3, we quantified how sea otter population status (i.e., sea otter cumulative density) and habitat type (i.e., sea otter foraging in open water, kelp canopy, emergent rock, or intertidal) influence sea otter diet, and found that habitat was 1.77 times more important than sea otter population status in determining sea otter diet composition. We also found that sea otter long-term average rate of energy intake and diet diversity were negatively and positively correlated with sea otter cumulative density, respectively. In Chapter 4, we demonstrated the ecological role of sea otters in the nearshore marine ecosystem in Washington as a keystone species. We found that temporal transitions in the amount of kelp canopy were related to the duration of sea otter occupation, and that this relationship was more complex than a simple linear function. We also found that sea urchins were present at higher densities at sites more recently occupied by sea otters compared to long-occupied sites. In Chapter 5, we demonstrated the impact of sea otters as a recovering predator on the Pacific razor clam (Siliqua patula). We found that the magnitude of sea otter predation effects varied over time and space, with sea otter-caused razor clam mortality surpassing natural mortality in 2018 at Kalaloch Beach, occupied by sea otters since 2005. We also found that sea otters selectively consume the larger “recruit” size razor clams, the size that is also targeted in the recreational fishery, despite the smaller pre-recruit size clams being more abundant. Collectively, these results provide a deeper understanding of sea otter recolonization in Washington State as well as the ecological consequences of this recolonization
