The most beautiful way to deal with climate change? Send Otters

The sea otter is an avid engineer of top-level ecosystems. To stay warm and healthy, they eat a quarter of their body weight a day, repeatedly diving to the bottom of the sea to gather bivalves like hedgehogs, crabs and clams. “By eating as much as they need to eat to survive in their environment, they have a huge impact on those habitats, and they are very positive,” Fuji says. (An attempt has been made to bring a different kind of program up the California coast.killer hedgehog”—Human divers.)

Keeping the hedgehog population under control preserves kelp in two main ways that are essential to the ecosystem. First, the forest is a habitat for fish, as they are a source of food for birds and other marine mammals, such as sea lions. Second, algae is part of what scientists call it.carbon blue”Ecosystem, that is, the coastal or marine area that captures carbon. (There are other areas wetlands and mangroves.)

But it is difficult to quantify exactly how much carbon a healthy kelp forest ingests. A redwood tree, for example, grows massively over hundreds of years, removing a lot of carbon on long time scales. (If not it catches fire, in which case the carbon is returned to the atmosphere.) Things move more under water. All kinds of animals, including sea urchins, are cutting algae and extracting carbon. Moreover, the mixed sea breaks up parts of the forest, which fall to the bottom and decompose, releasing stored carbon. So a kelp forest is constantly rotting and growing back, kidnapping and releasing carbon.

It is difficult to be sure how long carbon is trapped. “The fate of all this kelp is not well understood,” Wilmers says. “Imagine that all the things that are going down are sinking into the depths of the ocean and will not return again in 1,000 years. The benefit of carbon sequestration is far more significant than decomposing it and immediately decomposing it and returning it to the atmosphere.

Given this uncertainty, Wilmers has done some estimates The potential carbon benefits of healthy otters further north on the Pacific coast, between the Canadian border and the tip of the Aleutian Islands. If a kelp forest grows well, and half of the carbon it absorbs is seized in the deep sea, it would be the equivalent of canceling emissions from 5 million cars. Even if only 1 percent of carbon were to be hijacked in depth, that would be equal to the emissions of 100,000 cars.

In Monterey Bay, otters are not only protected by algae. They also climb Elkhorn Slough, a large tidal marsh where they encourage eel growth, another coastal plant that hijacks carbon, even though otters affect the plant. in a more indirect way. Otters eat crabs, and at the same time they eat invertebrates like sea slugs, which eat algae that grow on eels. Reducing the number of crabs that catch slugs helps the angle, because when the slugs remove the algae they keep the plants clean, allowing them to absorb more sunlight. The return of the otters has led to an increase in the number of eels in Elkhorn Slough it jumped 600 percent in the last three decades.