It’s been two years since a Santa Cruz sea otter, known as 841, garnered international attention and celebrity by attacking surfers and their surfboards as the human wave-riders alley-ooped over the waves of the legendary Steamer Lane.

It’s happening again.

This time, the identity of the otter is unclear. That’s because while 841 (who was born in captivity) carried a light blue tag on her right flipper, this otter is naked.

Experts say 841 could have chewed off her tag, or it could have broken off on its own. Otter flipper tags are designed to last an animal’s lifespan, but research shows they don’t always last so long.

It’s also possible this is an entirely different otter who may have watched 841 in the past, and is adopting her curious and bold behavior. It could be a relative. Or it could be this otter just has a similar surfboard appetite and hostage-taking drive.

On Thursday afternoon, roughly three dozen surfers were lined up to catch waves at Steamer Lane — just below the Santa Cruz coastline’s cliffs near the city’s iconic lighthouse and surfer statue.

Mark Woodward, a Santa Cruz-based social media influencer and dedicated 841 observer and chronicler, said he wasn’t sure whether this was 841, or someone different.

He said the animal’s behaviors and M.O. were almost identical. However, while 841 tended to hang close to the cliffs in 2023, this otter appeared to spend more time a bit farther out — closer to the offshore kelp beds.

He saw 841 last year — tag on — visiting the same waters but keeping her distance from people.

The only otter seen on Thursday was way off shore, floating on its back atop a kelp bed — presumably eating some tasty morsel, such as a crab or abalone, retrieved from the sea floor.

Pelicans glided over the cresting waves, while a harbor seal watched the surfers for a bit before diving under the surface and disappearing from sight.

During the summer of 2023, federal wildlife officials tried to capture 841. They sent out boats, rafts and swimmers. She evaded every attempt and eventually gave birth to a pup, whom she cradled on her chest as she floated atop the water — or placed on top of the kelp as she dived to the bottom to retrieve food. And she stopped chasing surfboards.

Eric Laughlin, spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the lead otter-response agency in this case. However, possibly due to the federal government shutdown, the agency did not respond to questions about the surfing-curious otter in Santa Cruz.

Laughlin said the state agency had no plans “to intervene with the sea otter currently interacting with humans in Santa Cruz.”

Research on California sea otters shows that along the central coast, there is “extreme individuality in diet and behavior.” Some of the variation is the result of relatively low food availability, requiring the clever creatures to figure out unique ways of finding and retrieving food.

However, the researchers also noted some behavioral traits seemed to follow family lines, especially those “maintained along matrilines.”

Surfers at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz on July 13, 2023.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

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Otter 841 was born in captivity to a mother who had been captured after spending too much time interacting with people and their watercraft. Since being released into the wild, she has given birth to at least two pups.

According to Woodward, the otter now frequenting Steamer Lane has been actively pursuing surfers nearly every day since Oct. 16, when it bit a surfer named Bella Orduna and stole her board.

Dripping wet and donned in a wet suit, Richard Walston, 55, said he hadn’t had any interactions with the surfer-curious creature — and he’s a frequent surfer in the area.

“Sure, I see otters,” he said. “But they’re so focused on their food, I’m not sure they even notice we’re around.”

Wildlife officials are urging surfers and boaters to keep their distance from this otter, and others — not only will this reduce the chances of an interaction, which could be dangerous for both people and otters, it is the law.

A new report based on government inspection documents shows salmonella is widespread in U.S. grocery store chicken and turkey products. But because of how the pathogen is classified, the federal government has no authority to do much about it.

Farm Forward, an organization that advocates for farmworker rights and humane farm practices, released a report this week that examined five years of monthly U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections at major U.S. poultry plants. It found that at many plants, including those that process and sell poultry under brand names such as Foster Farms, Costco and Perdue, levels of salmonella routinely exceeded maximum standards set by the federal government.

“The USDA is knowingly allowing millions of packages of chicken contaminated with salmonella to be sold in stores from major brands,” said Andrew deCoriolis, the organization’s executive director.

Some 1.3 million Americans are sickened each year by eating salmonella-contaminated food, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most people have only mild symptoms, but others suffer diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. Roughly 19,000 people are hospitalized annually, and an estimated 420 die from the infected food.

Chicken and turkey account for nearly a quarter of all salmonella infections, according to a 2021 government report on food illness.

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service inspects poultry plants monthly. The new report shows that five U.S. poultry plants exceeded maximum allowable salmonella contamination every month from 2020 to 2024. These included a Carthage, Mo., turkey plant owned by Butterball, a Dayton, Va., turkey plant owned by Cargill Meat Solutions, and a chicken plant located in Cunning, Ga., that is owned by Koch Foods. A Costco chicken producer, Lincoln Premium Poultry, exceeded the standard in 54 of 59 inspections.

“Lincoln Premium Poultry treats the safety of its products as an utmost concern,” Jessica Kolterman, the company’s director of administration, said in an email. “When the United State Department of Agriculture reports are updated and published, they will show that we have enhanced our standing. … We will continue to improve our processes.”

A spokesperson for Butterball said the company “takes food safety very seriously and follows all USDA and FSIS regulations and inspection protocols.” The spokesperson said facilities are subject to rigorous, continuous oversight, and they are “constantly reviewing and improving our food safety programs to ensure we meet or exceed government standards.”

Cargill, Perdue and Koch Foods did not reply to requests for comment. Foster Farms directed questions to the National Chicken Council, the industry’s trade group.

“Consumers should not be concerned,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the chicken council. He said the report was “unscientific” and described Farm Forward as an “activist organization whose stated goal is to end commercial chicken farming.”

Both Super and Bill Mattos, president of the California Poultry Federation, said poultry is safe when cooked to 160 degrees, and knives, cutting boards and other items that may have come into contact with raw meat are disinfected and cleaned.

“All chicken is safe to eat when properly handled and cooked,” said Mattos, noting that annually “Californians eat more chicken than any other state … 110 pounds per person!”

The report also suggests that the federal government’s standards for acceptable levels of salmonella are unduly high, and potentially put American poultry consumers at risk.

For ground chicken, the USDA allows 25% of samples at a plant to be contaminated. For ground turkey, 13.5%. Chicken parts should not exceed 15.4% of samples contaminated, while the number is 9.8% for whole chickens.

“I don’t know, but seems common sense to me that if you allow for a lot of salmonella, a lot of people are going to get sick,” said Bill Marler, an attorney with Marler Clark, a national food safety law firm.

When inspectors visit a plant, they do not assess the meat’s bacterial load, nor do they determine the strain of bacteria found on the product. They just test for the presence of the bacterium — it’s either there or it’s not.

According to Marler and Maurice Pitesky, a poultry science expert at UC Davis, there are hundreds of strains — or serotypes — of Salmonella. Most are considered harmless, but roughly 30 are known to be potentially lethal to people.

As a result, the USDA inspections don’t give a clear picture about what’s there, Pitesky said.

“When I hear something has salmonella, I’m like, ‘OK, first question: I want to know its serotype. What kind of serotype is it?’ Because that that’s really the relevant piece of information,” he said.

When inspectors find a plant has exceeded the salmonella standard, there is very little they can do except note it. The agency has no authority to enforce the standards.

Marler said in the 1990s, after four children died and hundreds of people got sick eating ground beef contaminated with E. coli sold at Jack in the Box restaurants, the agency decided to classify the bacterium as an adulterant. That designation meant the USDA could stop the sale of contaminated products, or shut down a plant that failed inspections.

He said the beef industry initially pushed back, fearing it would lose money — which it did, at first.

He said the USDA started doing retail testing, “and for a while, it felt like there was a recall a week — you know … 50, 100, a thousand pounds here, a million pounds there, even 10 million pounds.” Eventually, however, companies started testing their products “and coming up with interventions to get rid of it. And you know what? The number of E. coli cases linked to hamburger plummeted.”

He said now he sees a case only once in a while.

“I kind of look at that and think, well, if you get salmonella out of chicken, you’ll probably reduce those cases too,” he said.

Pitesky said that salmonella is notoriously difficult to get rid of. It can be introduced to flocks from wild animals, such as birds, rats, mice and other wildlife. It’s also found in the intestines of chickens, on their skin, feathers and feet, and it spreads among them when they poop, urinate and walk around in shared bedding, etc.

However, Marler thinks it can be controlled.

“Yeah, it’s difficult,” he said. “But you can do a lot of things. And this might piss people off, but you could eradicate flocks with salmonella. They do it in the EU all the freaking time.”

The European Union considers salmonella an adulterant, and require producers to reduce and control it via biosecurity, testing, vaccinations, recalls and occasionally depopulation.

“The fact is, if you make salmonella contamination expensive, if recalls exist and people feel embarrassed that they’re producing food that is making people sick or killing them, they’ll want to change their behavior,” he said.

Late last month, California fire officials made a courtesy call to Los Angeles.

The state’s proposed Zone Zero regulations that would force homeowners to create an ember-resistant zone around their houses — initially planned to take effect nearly three years ago — had caused an uproar in the region. It was time for damage control.

Officials from both Cal Fire and the state’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection visited Brentwood, the epicenter of the outrage, and Altadena, where homeowners are trying to figure out how best to rebuild, but did little to assuage the concerns of the Zone Zero proposals’ most vocal critics.

The two groups took turns pointing out homes that seemed to support their claims. The copious, contradictory anecdotal evidence provided no consensus for a path forward. For example, in the Eaton burn area, officials showed residents a home they claimed was spared thanks to its removal of vegetation near the home, but residents noted a home across the street with plenty of plants that also survived.

It was an example of what’s become an interminable debate about what should be required of homeowners in L.A.’s fire-prone areas to limit the destruction of future conflagrations.

Initial attempts by the board to create Zone Zero regulations, as required by a 2020 law, quietly fizzled out after fire officials and experts struggled to agree on how to navigate a lack of authoritative evidence for what strategies actually help protect a home — and what was reasonable to ask of residents.

The Jan. 1, 2023, deadline to create the regulations came and went with little fanfare. A month after the January fires, however, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order resurrecting the efforts and ordering the board to finish the regulations by the end of the year. As the board attempted to restart and speed-run the previous efforts through a series of public meetings, many Californians grew alarmed. They felt the draft Zone Zero requirements — which would be the strictest statewide defensible space rules on the books — were a step too far.

“The science tells us it doesn’t make sense, but they’re ignoring it because they have to come up with something,” said Thelma Waxman, president of the Brentwood Homeowners Assn.,who is working to certify neighborhoods in her area as fire safe. “If I’m going to go to my members and say, ‘OK, you need to spend $5,000 doing one thing to protect your home,’ it’s not going to be to remove hydrated vegetation.”

Instead, she wishes the state would focus on home-hardening, which has much more compelling research to support its effectiveness.

Tony Andersen, the board’s executive officer, stressed that his team wants to keep requirements evidence-based and reasonable for homeowners. “We’re listening; we’re learning,” he said.

Zone Zero is one of the many fire safety regulations tied to the fire hazard severity maps created by Cal Fire, which, while imperfect, attempt to identify the areas in California likely to see intense wildfire.

Since 2008, all new homes in California in areas that those maps determined have very high fire hazard are required to have multi-paned or fire-resistant windows that are less likely to shatter in extreme heat, mesh coverings on all vents so flying embers can’t sneak inside and ignition-resistant roofing and siding.

The state’s defensible space regulations break down the areas surrounding a home into multiple zones. Zone Two is within 100 feet of the home; in that space, homeowners must remove dead vegetation, keep grass under 4 inches and ensure that there is at least 10 feet between trees. Zone One is within 30 feet of a structure; here, residents cannot store firewood. Zone Zero, within 5 feet, is supposed to be “ember-resistant” — essentially meaning that there cannot be anything that might ignite should embers land within it.

The problem is, it’s unclear how to best create an “ember-resistant” zone. For starters, there’s just not a lot of scientific evidence demonstrating which techniques effectively limit ignitions. That’s especially true for the most controversial Zone Zero proposal: removing healthy plants.

“We have very few publications looking at home losses and vegetation patterns in Zone Zero,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire-dynamics researcher with UC Santa Barbara and the UC Cooperative Extension program.

Further complicating the problem, the board also needs to consider what is reasonable to ask of homeowners. Critics of the current proposal point out that while wooden fences and outbuildings are banned, wooden decks and doors are still fine — not because they cannot burn, but because asking residents to replace them is too big of a financial burden and they are, arguably, out of the purview of “defensible space.” And while many in the L.A. area argue they should be allowed to keep plants if they’re well-watered, the board cannot single-handedly dictate water usage for ornamental vegetation across the state.

To deal with the head-spinning complexity, the state started with a small working group in 2021 that included Cal Fire staff, local fire departments and scientists. The working group slowly grew to include more local leaders and came close to finalizing the rules with the board as it neared the Legislature’s Jan. 1, 2023, deadline. But as the parties got stuck on the final details, the deadline came and went. Zone Zero slowly fell off the meeting schedules and agendas and for two years, essentially nothing was done.

Then, L.A. burned.

In February 2025, Newsom signed an executive order pushing the board to finish the regulations by Dec. 31. As the board began hosting public hearings on the regulations, shock and frustration had set in among Californians.

To add insult to injury, Newsom’s executive order also pushed Cal Fire to release new hazard maps that the Legislature had also mandated. When the agency did that in the spring, many Californians were distraught to learn that the maps added over 300,000 acres — mostly in developed areas — into the classifications where Zone Zero will apply.

At a (now somewhat infamous) Zone Zero meeting at the Pasadena Convention Center in September — the only one to take place in Southern California — public comments stretched on for over five hours. They included several speakers more accustomed to receiving public comments than making them: The mayor of Agoura Hills, representatives for L.A. City Council members and the chair of L.A.’s Community Forest Advisory Committee.

Alongside marathon public meetings, the board received more than 4,000 letters on the regulations.

In a September report to L.A.’s City Council, the Los Angeles Fire Department and the city’s forestry committee chastised the board for failing to consult the city during the process and only holding its Pasadena meeting “after persistent pressure from local advocates … six months into the rulemaking process.” It also pointed to a 2025 study that found many home-hardening techniques play a much more significant role in protecting homes than defensible space.

Most of the Zone Zero proposals have generally received agreement or at least acceptance among the public: No wooden mulch, no wooden fence that attaches to the house, no dead vegetation and only outbuildings made of noncombustible materials. But two issues quickly took center stage in the discourse: trees and plants.

Residents have become increasingly concerned with the prospect of cutting down their trees after the working group began discussing how to handle them. However, the current proposals would not require residents to remove trees.

“It’s pretty much settled,” Andersen said. Well-maintained trees will be allowed in Zone Zero; however, what a well-maintained tree looks like “still needs to be discussed.”

What to do about vegetation like shrubs, plants and grasses within the first 5 feet of homes has proved more vexing.

Some fire officials and experts argue residents should remove all vegetation in the zone, citing examples of homes burning after plants ignited. Others say the board should continue to allow well-watered vegetation in Zone Zero, pointing to counterexamples where plants seemed to block embers from reaching a home or the water stored within them seemed to reduce the intensity of a burn.

“A hydrated plant is absorbing radiant heat up until the point of ignition, and then it’s part of the progression of the fire,” said Moritz. The question is, throughout a wildly complex range of fire scenarios, when exactly is that point reached?

In October, the advisory committee crafting the regulations took a step back from its proposal to require the removal of all living vegetation in Zone Zero and signaled it would consider allowing well-maintained plants.

As the committee remains stuck in the weeds, it’s looking more and more likely that the board will miss its deadline (for the second time).

“It’s more important that we get this right rather than have a hard timeline,” Andersen said.