Twenty-six years after reintroducing river otters to West Virginia's waterways, state wildlife officials believe it's time to open an otter-trapping season.

They've proposed to do precisely that, starting with the 2011-12 trapping period. If the state's Natural Resources Commission approves the proposal, possibly at its July meeting, trappers would be able to legally take one otter each season.

Rich Rogers, furbearer project leader for the Division of Natural Resources, said recent research showed that otters had become abundant enough to be trapped.

"We had known how widely they had spread throughout the state, but we didn't know if there were enough individuals to support a trapping season," Rogers said. "We finally got the data we needed to make a decision on that."

The information came from a seemingly unlikely source - the carcasses of female otters killed by cars or accidentally taken in traps intended for beavers or muskrats.

"We examined all the females' reproductive tracts for 'corpora lutea,' bodies in the ovaries that allowed us to estimate how many young the females had produced. We found a reproductive rate of 3.8 young per female, which is pretty darned good for an otter population."

Armed with that information, Rogers said biologists had no trouble recommending a trapping season, albeit one with a low bag limit.

"We proposed a one-animal limit because we want to keep the harvest rate at 10 percent of the population or lower," he said. "We estimate that even if trappers reach that 10 percent rate, we should still be able to maintain a healthy population."

The season, if approved, would be statewide. Otter populations have been confirmed in 40 of West Virginia's 55 counties, but have not yet been moved into the Northern Panhandle, the extreme southwestern corner of the state or a handful of north-central counties.

"The reason we went statewide is that otters were being caught incidentally by beaver and muskrat trappers anyway, so this way at least the pelts will be legal for the trappers to sell," Rogers said.

Establishing otters as a furbearer crop was a long-term goal for DNR officials in 1984, when they imported otters from Virginia, Louisiana and North Carolina to reestablish a Mountain State population long since eradicated by habitat loss and too much trapping.

The adaptable, fish-eating creatures took readily to West Virginia's streams.

Originally stocked in the Little Kanawha, West Fork and Elk River watersheds, they quickly spread to other river systems. Rogers said the only places they failed to thrive were "where human populations were very high, or where acid mine drainage was a problem and water quality wasn't good enough to support enough fish for otters to eat."

He estimated the adult survival rate of West Virginia's otters at 75 percent, a figure he considers conservative.

"In other states, it's been shown to be around 90 percent. Ours is probably closer to 90 than it is to 75, but I deliberately wanted to be conservative. Even at 75 percent, we would still maintain a very healthy population," he said.

If Natural Resources Commission members vote to approve the season, Rogers plans to enlist trappers' help for further population-health research.

"We'll ask them to keep the carcasses after they're skinned so that we can examine them," he said. "It will be a voluntary program, but the West Virginia Trappers Association has been very cooperative in some of our past research. I expect they will be this time, too."