There are few sights on the BC coast quite like a sea otter raft in full swing.
This summer, Luba Reshitnyk and Keith Holmes found one while conducting a drone survey near the Hakai Passage area—a dark, loosely shifting mass of animals rafted together on the water, rolling and grooming and cracking open urchins with the unhurried confidence of a species that knows it owns the place. Looking through the aerial footage, they counted 172 in a single group. Across the wider survey, the regional tally reached 212.
It's the largest raft either of them has seen on this stretch of coast in years.
Sea otters are, by almost any measure, one of the most charismatic animals on the Pacific coast. They're also one of the most ecologically important. Without them, sea urchins can multiply without check, grazing kelp forests down to bare rock. With otters in the picture, urchins decline, kelp recovers, and the fish, invertebrates, and countless other species that depend on those forests come back with it. Ecologists call this a trophic cascade—one predator, reshaping an entire food web from the top down. Sea otters are the classic example.
For more than a decade, the Hakai Institute has been monitoring kelp around northwest Calvert Island. The early years found that same pattern: when otters were abundant locally, kelp was too.
Then the otters moved on. Kelp declined. The urchins came back. The team kept watching.
Now comes the question: will history repeat itself?
There are already signs that it might. In 2023, a small advance group settled around the Breaker Group, and kelp responded within the same season. At West Beach and Second Beach, bull kelp has been climbing back toward levels not seen in years. The system is responding, the way it has before, the way the textbook says it should.
What comes next is the part that keeps the team watching closely. The rafts present right now are male groups—transient by nature, prone to moving on once they reach a certain size. The milestone that would signal something more permanent is a mom-and-pup raft settling in and staying: a breeding population that anchors itself to a place and begins the slower work of long-term ecosystem change. That hasn't happened yet south of Triquet Island.
“Where are the ladies?” Keith jokes. It's the question everyone will be watching over the next few years.
The story of sea otters on the central coast isn't new. It isn't finished either. But this season has given us another remarkable glimpse of it—and the footage to prove it.
