Increase harvest.

Screw the science and let the market decide? White and Boco are telling me the science says stop/slow harvest. What are we missing?

Science or sentiment? We were in the middle of a widespread beaver reduction effort.

Otters use abandoned beaver houses for natal dens. They also use beaver for food. Beaver dams create more habitat for fish and thus, otter. I agree with Boco.

Oh no...not only were we reducing the beaver population across thousands of acres, we were also taking out the damns and making rivers free flowing. Pull back the harvest even more?

Maybe one of the reasons we are unable to resolve issues is our inability to focus on the issue for the necessary time it may take. Our attention span is very short and maybe we all have Attention deficit issues. Within two weeks a wolf post damning the wolf on the landscape becomes other species issues and short comings. Remember as short as 5 years ago there was no desire to have anecdotal reports regarding deer or any species and then it abruptly changed to publically asking for those reports and coincidentally that happened at about the same time that research and science were being bashed as poor and not credible. If we want to use political and social information why not just say that we don't support the science and live even more with the consequences of political input? If we don't publically fund game management research then just maybe the research that gets funded is that promoted by those organizations that want to promote less harvest and or maybe none and for many species.


Bryce

I know otters tend to be density dependent. They can grow fast at low levels, then even out and don’t really grow past a carrying capacity.

Interestingly enough, since we decrease our harvest, our pregnancy rats have come back down. Back down to 70% adult and 30% juvenile, but our YOY are still only account for 35% of total harvest.

Now over the last few years we have reversed coarse and started to increase harvest. Wonder if they continued that trend this year and I wonder how the two otter resolution did? Both should have been discussed at the last Furbearer Advisory meeting this past month. Anyone hear?

Probably small otters are being turfed by trappers if they only have a quota of 2.
Not allowing trappers to keep and sell incidentals leads to bad science,if the powers that be are using harvests to get statistics.

Wait a minute. You are talking about pregnancy rates in the first sentence. The second sentence implies that 70% of adults and 30 % of juveniles are pregnant. I don't think that's what you mean.

If otter are like marten populations, 35% of the harvest being YOY is not a good sign.

Were talking about a species here that uses delayed implantation, and is very likely an induced ovulator. The same as marten. There are so many variables to the population dynamics that is just isn't possible to come up with an easy, straight forward solution.

Bryce is exactly right IMO. Need to make a decision about science v. ballot box biology. There really isn't a choice between the two as far as I'm concerned.

I guess I should have used yearling(1.5 years) instead of juvenile. Wasn't trying to imply our YOY were pregnant. Here is the data from our harvest.
http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/WildlifeHabitat/documents/reports/otterpop2.pdf

35% YOY harvest tells you something is wrong. How do you know if you need to increase or decrease harvest?

Boco, not sure where the numbers are this year, but it was something like one out of 3 trappers received "A" tag on any given year. There was an effort to increase that to every trapper getting two tags. It failed the first time to get past the DNR Furbearer Advisory Committee.

You haven't said what the adult female harvest is relative to the YOY harvest. That, IMO, is what you need to know to make an informed decision. Maybe it is in your link above. I haven't looked at that yet.

Quick math says we were harvesting .27 adult females for each YOY and that increased to .37 adult females for each YOY.

So that would be about 3 YOY per adult female ?

Yes. Pretty close. Dropped from 3.6 YOY per adult to 2.6 YOY per adult. Just a rounding error?

That looks like more than a rounding error.

Nevertheless, in Marten we want to see 4 YOY per adult female ideally. 3 YOY per adult female seems to be about the best I have been able to manage over the last 36 years on the same line. I would stop trapping them if it dropped below 3. In fact I have stopped trapping them because they have completely disappeared.

The YOY kept declining and then there were none. No adults either.

This is an interesting paragraph to me.

From the report above.

Age structure and reproductive rates

"Carcasses were obtained from 1,079 otters (646 males, 416 females, 17 unknown) harvested
during the 2012-13 season and age at harvest was estimated for 642 males and 414 females.
Age data has been obtained from 3,505 male and 2,491 female otters harvested since 1979
(Tables 1 and 2). Age distributions were similar between sexes. The age structure in the harvest
has changed over the 7 collection periods for both sexes. The proportion of juveniles was lower and the proportion of yearlings or 2.5 year old otters was higher in the 4 most recent collections than in the 3 prior collections."

This would say to me that production of pups is falling and the reason they are finding higher proportions of yearlings and 2.5 year olds is because those were the YOY over the past three years while production dropped.

I would expect to see a decline in the proportion of yearlings and 2.5 year olds also if the YOY decline continues.

Also, I don't understand the language where they say ...."yearlings OR 2.5 year old otters..". Do they consider a 2.5 year old otter to be a yearling or am I misreading that line ?

They just worded that goofy based on the chart imo. Remember, we get age and reproductive rates every the years but it is listed in the chart.

Maybe we need to add another variable. Personal observation. Did certain areas dry up, or did you still see just as much sign as your ratio changed on marten?

Or did you hit on the main piece? The increase in yearlings? Shouldn't this of fell next instead of increasing?

Isn't the title of this post "WI Wolves"? Seems it's getting a little of track. Not that what y'all are discussing is a bad thing mind you, went from wolves to otter to marten.

Carry on Wolfers.

Personal observation ??