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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63105 Medium Sea otters and kelp forest ecology

Read the following passage.

A. For thousands of years before the fur trade, sea otters lived along the coast from northern Japan to central Baja California, Mexico. On Haida Gwaii, the Haida and the otters were neighbours, eating some of the same seafoods, including urchins, clams, crabs and abalone. Unlike seals and sea lions, sea otters have little body fat. Instead they rely on one of the thickest furs in the animal kingdom, which has at least 150,000 hairs in each square centimetre and holds bubbles of air against the skin for warmth. The maritime fur trade that began in the 1700s drove them to the brink of extinction.

B. The hunting went on through the 1800s. Otters disappeared from Haida Gwaii waters early in that century, and by 1929 none were left in British Columbia; small colonies survived only in parts of Alaska and California. Their loss changed the sea floor. Sea otters are among the very few predators of large red sea urchins, which feed on kelp. Without otters, urchin numbers exploded and the underwater forests were grazed down to a tiny fraction of their former size. They turned into urchin barrens, areas thick with sea urchins but with little else.

C. Sea otters were protected by law in 1911, but it took until 1969 for any to be brought back. Between 1969 and 1972, 89 sea otters from Alaska were released into Checleset Bay on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and only about 28 of them survived. From that small start the population grew. Otters dive for their food, usually within one to two kilometres of shore, in water no more than 40 metres deep. A familiar sight is an otter floating on its back and cracking a shell against a rock on its chest, one of the few animals known to use a tool.

D. Surveys show how far the recovery has come. In 2017 the British Columbia population was estimated at 8,110 sea otters, growing by an average of 5.26 per cent a year from 2013 to 2017, with the fastest growth in newly occupied areas. In 2009 the species was moved from threatened to special concern because numbers were rising. Where otters have returned, kelp forests are in much better shape. Otters are now coming back to Haida Gwaii on their own, and since 2020 Gwaii Haanas and the Council of the Haida Nation have been planning for their return, which is expected to take decades.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
A survey late in the 2010s put the number of otters in British Columbia above eight thousand.

- 2.
The otters released at Checleset Bay were brought there by a federal fisheries department.

- 3.
By the late 1920s, no otters could be found anywhere in British Columbia.

- 4.
Roughly one in three of the animals brought from Alaska stayed alive.

- 5.
Long ago, coastal people and otters ate several of the same sea creatures.

- 6.
The Haida ate larger amounts of urchins than the otters did.

- 7.
The animals break open their prey with a stone while lying face up in the water.

- 8.
Instead of a heavy layer of blubber, the animals stay warm thanks to their coat.

- 9.
With the otters gone, the urchins multiplied and cut the seaweed beds down to a small part of their earlier size.

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