Prof. Tom Serfass and friends release otter in Juniata River. Game Commission Photo

Tom Serfass grew up in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania, and saw first-hand the impacts of sprawl development on the wildlife he loved. So it wasn’t surprising that he returned to the Ponoco region to begin one of the most successful reintroduction programs in the country—bringing the nearly extinct river otter back to a large swath of Pennsylvania.

As a professor at East Stroudsburg University, and later Penn State and Frostburg State University, Serfass has been the architect of the river otter reintroduction effort in Pennsylvania and a consulting biologist for reintroduction efforts across the country and worldwide.

He and his program are also long-time recipients of numerous grants from DCNR’s Wild Resource Conservation Program, which has supported the otter reintroduction effort over the years. Serfass came to DCNR last month as the featured speaker of the monthly Rachel Carson Lecture Series on environmental issues.

Over the course of the 20th century, river otters—once ubiquitous across Pennsylvania—began a serious decline due to over-trapping and poor water quality. Without the small fish and crayfish otter depend on for their primary food sources, otters could no longer survive in the wild.

Serfass and a team of assistants captured wild otters still living in the Ponoco region, along with otters captured in the Adirondacks, and kept them healthy and inoculated over the winter for releases into the wild beginning in the mid-1990s.

Initially, otters were released in Tionesta, Loyalsock and Pine Creeks in northwestern Pennsylvania, and have since been released in central and southwestern parts of the state, including the Youghiogheny watershed. Today, the otters are thriving and moving across the state on their own.

“We made a lot of mistakes, but we always adhered to a rigorous protocol and we always looked at ethical issues,” explained Serfass.

One of the first issues to arise was the concern that fishermen across the state would resent the reintroduction of a carnivorous species that competed for fish. Serfass and his graduate students conducted research to determine what otters were really eating in the wild. They analyzed otter droppings to find that otters primarily concentrated on slow-moving fish like creek chub, not prized trout that anglers would favor.

They also discovered that crayfish made up a huge part of the otter diet. Once they were able to share this information with anglers, their objections to the re-introductions stopped, explained Serfass.

“We had up to 200 people watching some of these releases,” he explained.

Today Serfass and his graduate students are working on monitoring the released otters’ movements across Pennsylvania to see how rapidly their numbers are increasing, to follow their dispersal patterns, and to learn more about the family and individual behaviors of this highly secretive and nocturnal animal.

Graduate students like Emily Just spend their time analyzing otter “latrine” sites to determine numbers of otters visiting, leaving scents and how they interact as family groups. Serfass said he hopes DCNR can help in future years recruiting volunteer monitors and continuing support for the research.

Links: River Otters in Pennsylvania – Game Commission

Get A River Otter License Plate for Your Vehicle

(Courtesy of DCNR’s Resource newsletter.)

11/24/2006