Many species of wildlife have been eliminated from their traditional range, for one
reason or another.In other cases, species have naturally recovered from catastrophic decline, expanding
into their former range.In remarkably short order, this massive population was nearly extir pated, through a combination of commercial hunting by Europeans and subsistence
hunting by aboriginal groups, competition with livestock, and fencing off of migra tion routes (Isenberg 2000).A small relict population of
otters survived in an inaccessible part of the California coast south of Monterey Bay
and provided the nucleus for gradual spread of the population back northward and
southward along the coast.A well-documented example is the California sea otter (Enhy dra lutris; Lubina and Levin 1988).