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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 ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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 ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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 ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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 ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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 ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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 ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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, ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. 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. ALL STORIES ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSION . TO LICENSE THIS OR OTHER STORIES: Contact Alaska Stock's International Distribution Coordinator, Gina Bringman ([email protected]), for details on licensing this content. Lightbox: sea otter Images: 19 116SE BF0007D002 116SE BF0009D001 116SE BC0001D001 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" Caption: CAPTIVE Two Sea Otters holding paws at Vancouver Aquarium in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada CAPTIVE" 116SE FU0001D001 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 116SE AP0001 015 116SE AP0003 001 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 116SE BL0001 001 116SE BH0003 001 116SE AY0002 001 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