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The sea otter (Enhydra lutris) was one of the more important prizes that brought Europeans to the Pacific Northwest. A really big sea otter will weigh in at about one hundred pounds, but most of them are considerably smaller. They are basically weasels that took to sea water somewhere in the distant past. In times past they ranged up and down the Pacific Coast of America and at the beginning of the eighteenth century are thought to have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Native Alaskans hunted the sea otter for their fur and as food, but they did not seriously impact their numbers. In the early part of the eighteenth century, Russian hunters, operating in the Kuril Islands sold sea otter fur to China, but the Great Hunt for sea otters commenced after the second Bering expedition in 1741. The Russians hunted up and down the coast of North America during the remainder of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. As the number of sea otter declined in northern waters in the early nineteenth century, they founded Fort Ross in California to support their southern operations. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the sea otter was well on its way to extinction. In 1911, Russia, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States signed a treaty which banned the hunting of sea otters. Today the sea otter is considered to be an endangered species.
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