U.S. Fish & Wildlife ServiceThe following map shows the historic range of the Sea Otter around the pacific rim before the fur trade that extended from the Russian coast to the California coast during the colonization period where they population had almost went extinct. The sea otter's brush with extinction began far away from those rocky shores, in the Russian Far East. Aboard the ship Svyatoy Petr (Saint Peter), Vitus Bering's second Kamchatka expedition foundered in storms and wrecked near an uninhabited island, later named after Bering himself, who was buried there. From the moment Bering's men returned home to Russia with sea otter pelts, the species was in mortal danger. It was 1742. With more hairs per square inch than those of any other mammal, the thick, lush furs fetched enormous sums.ArcGIS FeatureLayerhttps://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/1075f9600f0948bfa41e6c1e88f73300_1engU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Open DataPublicHistoric SeaOtter Range [United States]Web servicesUnited StatesLast Modified: 2023-09-12