An otter dies crossing the street, and a bureaucratic tangle follows.

I once saw a mountain lion as it crossed the street in front of my headlights on a mountain road in Death Valley National Park. At first I couldn’t identify what it was – at a glance, I thought it was a donkey.

A similar thing happened when I watched a recent iPhone video of a sea otter walking across Moss Landing Road. Even though I knew what to expect, I first saw a giant raccoon. On second glance, maybe a small bear.

But there it was, an otter who’d been routinely going back and forth from Moss Landing Harbor to Moro Cojo Slough. The video I saw was captured by Jamie Jarrard and her husband Andrew Dolan, who live right on the slough and whose 3-year-old son named the otter Digger, because of his habit of digging for clams. Other locals nicknamed the otter Mr. Enchilada, due to the proximity to The Whole Enchilada, and others called him Captain Moss.

Whatever he was called, Jarrard and Dolan came to see this otter as a family friend of sorts, observing his feeding activities – morning, noon and night, with a preference for clams and black crabs – and his regular street crossings.

They bought a sign that says “Sea Otter Crossing” for $15 on Amazon, and mounted it on a piece of their old fence to alert drivers. They took to running out into the streets, arms up to block traffic to protect him. “Sometimes people wouldn’t even stop,” Jarrard says. “It was really scary.”

Since they moved into their place last spring, Jarrard and Dolan became crossing guards for the otter. When they prepared to leave town for the July 4 weekend, they worried he might not be OK.

When they returned home, they learned the otter had been struck by a car and killed. “We felt like we were responsible for his life,” Jarrard says.

Actually, a combination of agencies – local, county, state and federal – is responsible for protecting sea otters, which are listed as a threatened species. Representatives of various agencies, including the Monterey County Water Resources Agency, Monterey County Public Works, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Moss Landing Harbor District were there to investigate how the otter ended up dead in the first place, options to prevent future collisions, and in part, to answer the seemingly simple riddle: Why did the otter cross the road?

The answer involves past and present, ag and urban development, fresh and saltwater – competing interests that twist in a regulatory tangle.

Animals can cross under Moss Landing Road through culverts at low tide, but to get back at high tide, they have to cross the street because tide gates close, keeping ocean water from the harbor out of Moro Cojo Slough.

Mark Foxworthy, an associate engineer at the county Water Resources Agency, says it’s been that way since about the 1850s, even before the otter population was decimated in the fur trade – and well before the harbor was dredged into existence.

The tide gates originally served the purpose of benefitting farmers along the Moro Cojo Slough who wanted avoid saltwater intrusion. The current gates were installed in 1989, and Foxworthy has gotten three separate emergency permits, the most recent granted Jan. 4, for maintenance work on those tide gates that block otter access. Mostly they’ve been piling up sandbags to stop the whole thing from leaking.

Now people are clamoring for an otter crossing, including Friends, Artists and Neighbors of Elkhorn Slough, whose attorneys are asking tough questions about the gates that closed off access to begin with, and whether those three permits spread across three years are even legal. (When Foxworthy applies for a long-term fix to the leaky tide gates, he expects at least six agencies will sign off.)

The problem now is that other protected species, like the brackish water snail and the tidewater goby, live on the slough side of the gates, and letting more saltwater flow through would probably imperil them.

The tidewater goby is a translucent fish with gray mottling, up to about 2 inches long. There’s nothing attractive or relatable about them. But like otters, they are also in jeopardy.

SARA RUBIN is interim editor of the Weekly. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com or follow her on Twitter @sarahayleyrubin.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the following correction: Jamie Jarrard's surname is Jarrard, not Jarrad as originally spelled.