The Sun would like to clarify some information written in the May 31 cover story, “Journey to otter space,” about U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly’s Military Readiness and Southern Sea Otter Conservation Act. According to Gallegly’s spokesman Tom Pfeifer, the bill requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain its current species management plan until it develops a new plan.
“The bill recognizes, however, that the containment zones currently in place are a failure and that sea otters cannot be artificially contained,” Pfeifer said in an e-mail to the Sun, adding that no containment zones are foreseen in the next management plan. “In fact, the bill explicitly states that [Fish and Wildlife Service] must ‘allow for the expansion of the range of the population of the sea otter.’ The reason to keep the current plan in place is to protect the military from the incidental take provisions, not to contain sea otters, which—again—have proven not to be containable.”
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This article appears in Jun 7-14, 2012.
