Birds and Marine Wildlife / 77used in the clean-up of the shoreline killed by weight as many ani-
mals as did the initial oiling.^46
Sea otters, especially breeding females and their pups, suffered
high mortality because of the spill. Between thirty-fi ve hundred and
fi fty-fi ve hundred otters were estimated to have died from expo-
sure to oil, out of a population of ten thousand in the entire oiled
area. No response plan for sea otters was in place at the time of the
spill, and a week elapsed before the deployment of the fi rst rescue
vessels. For these creatures, as for birds exposed to oil, time is of
the essence. Many otters captured within the fi rst week of rescue
had already been heavily oiled for several days, and survival rates
were low.^47
Before the spill, according to one account, otters “swam peace-
fully in the coastal waters of southern Alaska, enjoying little recog-
nition from the general public.”^48 But immediately following the
spill, when the childlike, playful mammals appeared in the media
“rubbing their eyes and grooming their fur in a futile attempt to
rid their coats of the slimy crude oil,” they quickly captured public
attention.^49 The sea otter became the “poster child” of the incident.
Although the spill affected far more birds than it did sea otters, the
anthropomorphic otters became the perfect victims of the disaster.
The otters put an adorable, furry face on the effects of the oil.
When press accounts of the spill revealed that it would signifi -
cantly affect wildlife, the story quickly became one of international
interest. A LexisNexis search using the terms sea otters and oil
reveals 249 articles in the U.S. and world media during the twelve
months following March 24, 1989, compared with only 23 arti-
cles in the preceding year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the
agency charged with the management of sea otters in Alaska (under
the Marine Mammal Protection Act), usually receives 140 queries
a year at its Anchorage offi ce on all topics related to its activities.
In the six months following the spill, the service received more
than 460 press queries just on otters, representing a 600 percent
increase. The media exploited the appeal of the otters, often por-
traying them as being at the mercy of a bureaucratic tangle that was
preventing their rescue. In response to stories with headlines such