crucial shellfish fisheries in Southeast<\/a>. The region\u2019s Dungeness crab fishery closed early this summer.<\/p>\n ![\"Sea](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788490836_14_.png\"\/)
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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Photo<\/p>\n
Sea otters are a federally protected species under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.<\/p>\n
And Hursey saw the impact up close.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019d go to a place where it’d been a good productive area,\u201d he said, \u201cand if you saw sea otters around, you\u2019d go down and the bottom looked like it’d just been rototilled. Not an abalone left.\u201d<\/p>\n
The abalone fishery in Southeast Alaska closed in 1997. Hursey and Bangs founded the sea cucumber fishery shortly after, but Hursey says it wasn\u2019t the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt still wasn\u2019t the kind of money that you could make abalone diving,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Sea otters are a federally protected species under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which means options for controlling the population are limited. They can\u2019t be directly harvested except for subsistence hunting.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is in charge of sea otter management. They declined an interview request, but a spokesperson said in an email that they were aware of dive fishermen\u2019s concerns.<\/p>\n
Jeff Meucci is a former dive researcher for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He spent 20 years surveying dive fishery animal populations and saw what sea otters did to the ocean floor.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe definitely came across a lot of areas out by the ocean that had big trenches where otters had come in and dug up the substrate, and they had taken all the geoducks out,\u201d Meucci said.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788490837_472_.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
A hole dug by an otter at the bottom of the seafloor.<\/p>\n
While dive fisheries are not a huge part of the Southeast economy, they\u2019re an important option for local fishermen. The main dive fisheries in Southeast are sea cucumber and geoduck clams. There are about 200 active dive fishermen in the region, and last season, the fisheries brought in almost $7 million combined.<\/p>\n
Meucci said small boat fisheries mean a lot to a town like Petersburg.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re small business owners,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd a town like Petersburg needs small businesses to help keep things going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though sea cucumbers aren\u2019t a part of the sea otters diet, their presence still impacts the fishery.<\/p>\n
Alec Schramek is an active dive fisherman and a salmon troller based in Petersburg. He said that fishermen need to diversify to be financially sustainable, but dive fishing makes up at least half of his income.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s been fishing sea cucumbers for 13 years, and said otters are harming sea cucumber habitats that he fishes. One example is an area he\u2019s fished called Snow Pass, south of Petersburg.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last rotation that we were there, there was a stark difference in the population of the sea cucumbers,\u201d he said. \u201c\u200aAnd it’s obvious that the otters have been there because it looks like a bulldozer has been on the bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meucci, Schrameck, and Hursey all said they would like to see some sort of management of the otters\u2019 population, but because of otters\u2019 protected status, it makes having that conversation really hard.<\/p>\n
Schrameck worries about the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just seems like, if things continue the way they are,\u201d he said, \u201cinevitably they’re going to expand more and more and just continue to reduce the amount of areas that are fishable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sea cucumber season opens in early October, and runs through the end of March. For now, Schrameck and other divers will be out there, under the waves and combing the ocean floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Scott Hursey\u2019s basement workshop, there is a guitar on a worktable he\u2019s building from scratch, and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":835736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-835735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/835736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Hursey](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1788490834_448_.jpeg\"\/)
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