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Something About Sea Otters (1564 words)
(Story by Nick Jans/AlaskaStock.com Article number 998ST_ZU0019_001. Story and photos are Copyright
2008 by Alaska Stock Images. Use only with permission. Compensation mandatory)
“We’ve got some ahead,” says captain John Dunlap of Allen
Marine, as he idles the boat toward an unnamed rocky island. Our
small group leans forward, peering into the morning fog, and see
what he sees: a cluster of dark shapes near shore. At first glance,
they could be scraps of driftwood bobbing against the kelp. But as we
ease closer, they take form and come to life--a pod of Alaska sea
otters. Rafted together, floating on their backs, they’ve spent the night
in the island’s lee. As shafts of light cut through the mist, they’re in
first cup of coffee mode, just getting on with their day. A few eye us,
craning their necks, then dive. Others groom with busy paws and
mouths, whiskers to tail. Some yawn and snooze practically in the
shadow of the boat.
We’re in Sitka Sound on the outer coast of Southeast Alaska—
one of a few places in the state where you can regularly find and view
the state’s smallest but arguably most charismatic marine mammal.
Normally, I consider that other “c” word a chick thing. That said, I
have to swallow hard and admit the truth—sea otters are Cute, with a
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capital C. You could take a bunch of Hell’s Angels and stand them
along a boat rail with a few otters below, and watch those tough guys
dissolve into a sentimental, cooing mess. There’s just something
about sea otters that pushes that button inside us. They’re like living
stuffed animals, with those dark, button eyes, long whiskers, and
round, grizzled faces that are at once blank and somehow infinitely
expressive. We see otters and channel into some childhood memory
of Bukka Bear or Mopsy Bunny and all the warm fuzzies that went
along with that time. And no matter what they’re up to—down to
snoring or stuffing food into their mouths—otters are still unremittingly
cute, 24/7. Not even the Olsen twins in their prepubescent prime
could pull that off.
Our attraction goes another layer. We may not have fur or tails
or webbed feet, but somehow, when we gaze at sea otters, we catch
glimpse of what we imagine to be ourselves at our laid-back,
gregarious best. Their whiskered faces seem to express a beatific
contentment, with occasional flashes of good-natured curiosity or
round-mouthed, head-scratching puzzlement. An otters resting on its
back, front paws clasped over its chest and hind feet sticking up,
looks for the world like some furry little human taking an after-lunch
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nap on a watery couch. At other times, those clever little “hands”
seem folded in prayer, or busy, amazingly enough, with tools, just like
us (some sea otters regularly carry rocks in the folds of their
underarms, and use them to crack open shellfish.) We like them too
because they’re fastidiously clean. Then we have the mothers,
cradling and fussing over their single helpless pups so like our own.
And sea otters never seem to fret or struggle, and never lose that
stylish cool. Fresh seafood every day for the picking and endless
lounging with your pals—it’s a life any working stiff should envy.
Of course, we’re just indulging in feel-good anthropomorphic
fantasy. We really don’t know what’s going on inside their furry
heads, nor their lives. All we see is them resting and grooming on the
surface, and the swirls as they gracefully dive and become invisible.
The fact is, once we get past the aw-shucks mode, there’s not much
cute about sea otters or the lives they lead. Starting with mating,
when the male sinks his dagger-sharp teeth into the smaller female’s
nose and just about drowns her, the of world sea otters is a roughand-tumble, life or death matter.
Without the insulating blubber of whales or seals, otters spend
their lives in 30 to 50-degree water that sucks heat from their bodies
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at a relentless rate. Their first barrier against that loss is unbelievably
dense fur—up to a million hairs per square inch. By comparison, the
average human head has about 20 thousand, total. But if that fur gets
matted or soiled, loses the countless tiny air bubbles trapped in its
layers, the insulating value plummets and the animal is doomed. That
charming, never-ending grooming isn’t some foppish indulgence of a
creature with too much time on its paws, but a matter of dire
necessity. And the clasped front paws, along with the head, and rear
flippers held carefully out of the heat-sapping water are part of a
strategy to conserve precious calories. Every one counts. All that
lazing is just another five-star conservation plan at work. If a sea otter
were in charge of our energy policy, gas would still be a buck a
gallon.
That said, sea otters are ferocious guzzlers. Shake the family
tree and down fall such notable warm fuzzies as wolverines, badgers,
minks, and skunks. Enhydra lutris, of the genus mustelidae, is
nothing more than a mega-sized, seagoing weasel. A big male might
reach 80, even 100 pounds (females seldom top 60). Imagining a 60pound mink might help snap the concept into focus. While the
preferred diet of sea urchins and 40-odd species of shellfish and
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other assorted invertebrates might seem far less bloodthirsty to us
than the mink’s ducks and muskrats, both species, like the rest of
their genus, are the sort of insatiable predators you could morph into
a Hollywood thriller. Those minimal fat reserves compel sea otters to
eat around 25 percent of their weight every day just to break even. In
human terms, imagine Kobayashi, that hundred-pound Japanese guy
who ate 54 hot dogs with buns on July 4, doing that not for a worldrecord stunt but out of desperate need day in and out for the rest of
his life. Now, just for fun, consider a raft of 50 otters weighing 60
pounds each—3000 pounds of mustelid requiring 750 pounds of
urchins, clams, abalone, Dungeness crab, and whatever else is
around. That’s minus the shells. So the real weight of living mass
vacuumed from the ocean floor might be double that or more, 365
days a year. And while 50 otters is a pile, the largest raft ever
recorded numbered around a thousand animals.
Though crab fishermen and abalone divers might shake their
fists, all that eating isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Marine ecologists
label sea otters a “keystone” species—one that dictates the shape of
the environment. One of the otter’s favorite snacks is the sea urchin;
one animal might gobble a couple dozen a day. Meanwhile, urchins
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graze voraciously on kelp beds, which provide nurseries and shelter
for countless species, including many of the fish we consider
valuable. In areas where otters have vanished, so have these
nurturing kelp beds, grazed to the nubs by armies of urchins. The
presence of otters, then, actually increases the productivity and
diversity of a given system. To extend the metaphor, remove that
keystone and the arch falls.
Two hundred years ago, we almost ruined that arch for good.
The first Russian traders were drawn to Alaska by the incredible
abundance of sea otters, each with a luxurious pelt worth a small
fortune. No one knows exactly how many otters existed in the early
1800’s when the slaughter commenced in earnest, but estimates run
into the hundreds of thousands. What the Russians started, we
finished off in the late 1800’s. By 1911, when sea otters finally
received international protection by treaty, their numbers had
dwindled to as few as 2,000 across their entire range, and they’d
been exterminated from huge areas.
But thanks to that protection, a successful transplant and
reintroduction plan, and the natural resiliency of the species, Alaska’s
sea otters now number well over 100,000. Their range is currently
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expanding in Southeast Alaska, with concentrations found along the
outer coast, including Sitka Sound, and into Glacier Bay National
Park. While the sea otter population in Prince William Sound took a
major hit from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, they’ve rebounded
since, and numbers seem stable. In the remote Aleutian Island chain
and along the Alaska Peninsula, it’s another story. While three
decades ago close to 50 thousand sea otters thrived across this farflung region, numbers have plummeted by as much as 80 percent.
This time, the prime suspects isn’t man--at least not directly. Both
scientific research and eyewitness reports point to a sudden rise in
predation by pods of orcas known as transients, which specialize in
hunting marine mammals. One theory is that the decline in Stellar sea
lion numbers (perhaps linked to human over-fishing or climate
change) have forced the whales to gobble the much smaller, far less
nutritious otters in huge numbers. And in those areas where otters
are absent, kelp beds are once again disappearing. The mystery
continues to unfold as researchers study the phenomenon.
But overall, the future of enhydra lutris, this Beanie Baby of the
weasel clan, seems secure. They serve as living, breathing reminders
of our limitless capacity for greed and redemption, and of the spiritual,
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aesthetic, and biological richness a single species can offer us. I look
out over these creatures and try to imagine the ocean as it almost
was—a place without sea otters. And there they are, bobbing and
preening, their puzzled faces raised toward us, as if asking what we
were thinking.
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Lightbox: sea otter
Images: 19
116SE BF0007D002
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Caption:
Sea Otter raft floating near Cordova in Prince
William Sound of Southcentral, Alaska during
Summer"
Caption:
Sea Otter upright in water looks curiously
towards shore near Cordova, Alaska in
Prince William Sound"
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CAPTIVE Two Sea Otters holding paws at
Vancouver Aquarium in Vancouver, British
Columbia Canada CAPTIVE"
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116SE EQ0002 001
Caption:
Close up of Sea Otter Resurrection Bay KP
AK Summer near Seward
Caption:
Sea Otter Mother Floating in PWS Cradles
Baby KP AK Summer
116SE AR0002 001
Caption:
Close up Portrait of Sea Otter Prince William
Sound Alaska Summer
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Caption:
Sea Otter Swimming at Tacoma Zoo Captive
Caption:
Sea Otter cleaning & eating Tacoma Zoo
Washington summer portrait
116SE BH0001 001
Caption:
Close up Portrait of Sea Otter Captive
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Caption:
Sea Otter portrait swimming yawning
California
Caption:
Close Up Portrait of Sea Otter Alaska
Summer
Caption:
Sea Otter Floating on Back Eating Southeast
AK Summer
116SE HT0004N001
Caption:
Sea Otters amongst an ice floe in Prince
William Sound, Alaska"
116SE GG0001D001
116SE EM0001D001
Caption:
Close-up of a captive Sea Otter floating on
it's back. Spring in Alaska.
Caption:
Aerial view of large pod of sea otters in
Harriman Fjord, Prince William Sound,
Alaska"
116SE GB0002D001
116SE AR0003 001
116SE AB0001 001
Caption:
Sea otters rest wrapped in kelp beds Pacific
Ocean California Spring
Caption:
Close up of Sea Otter in Prince William Sound
Alaska Summer
Caption:
Sea Otter Eating a Crab While Swimming on
Back AK Recovering From Oil Spill Seward
Dungeness Crab2 of 3