Brent Hughes, an assistant professor of marine ecology and conservation at Sonoma State University.

Brent Hughes, an assistant professor of marine ecology and conservation at Sonoma State University, is a self-proclaimed “algal nerd.” But last week, while speaking at a Garden Club of America event, he wasn’t just talking gardens or algae — he was talking otters.

Hughes’ dive into studying otters was accidental. While studying eelgrass at San Jose State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories around 2008, he noticed the marine plant was actually starting to recover amid a large, normally destructive algal bloom.

“It was bizarre,” Hughes told SFGATE over the phone after the Garden Club of America meeting. “We didn’t immediately go, ‘Oh, it must be the sea otters.’ That was literally the last thing [we considered].”

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He tried to find an explanation — El Niño, seasonal temperature fluctuations — yet there was nothing to account for the abnormality. The “a-ha” moment finally took place when he got hold of a data set from a tour operator at Elkhorn Slough Safari, which operates out of Moss Landing.

“Capt. Yohn was giving all the tourists on the boat little hand counters, you know, the clickers?” said Hughes. He instructed passengers to click every time they saw a sea otter, so they could later compare who saw the most. “He was doing this almost every day, sometimes several times a day, for 15 years, and he was actually recording the data.”

A sea otter in the estuarine water of Elkhorn Slough, Monterey Bay, Calif.

Hughes had been on the brink of giving up on his eelgrass study and had no idea he was about to make a startling discovery when he overlaid the sea otter data with the area where the marine plant had recovered.

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“They kind of followed each other in time, and it was almost like the two time series fit together like a glove,” said Hughes, recognizing that........

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