When One Protected Species Kills Another

With this paper, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium showed recovering great white shark populations are making it harder for another protected species to recover from past overexploitation: the sea otter. In the case of the great white sharks and sea otters, fixing the otter habitat may be an effective way to help otters (and other California wildlife) without hurting the sharks. “We didn’t do a lot of ecological studies before driving these wildlife populations to near-extinctions,” says Salvador Jorgenson of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, an expert on great white sharks and a coauthor on the shark and otter study.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com