Did industrial whaling cause decline in sea otters?
Jeff Barnard, Associated Press Writer GRANTS PASS, Oregon A cascading decline in seal, sea lion and sea otter populations in the North Pacific may have been triggered by industrial whaling after World War II that forced packs of killer whales to look for new sources of food, a group of scientists suggest. “If our hypothesis is correct, either wholly or in significant part, commercial whaling in the North Pacific Ocean set off one of the largest and most complex ecological chain reactions ever described,” the scientists wrote in an article appearing this week on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Web site. The hypothesis goes against past theories that declines in Steller sea lions and other marine mammals off Alaska dating to the 1970s were caused by a lack of food due to overfishing by humans. That research led to limits on commercial pollock fishing. “We feel that that abrupt and huge loss of whale biomass was important to some portion of the killer whale population,
