Sea otters: because near-extinction stories are wonderful (and the otters are so darned cute)

I wrote my fourth-grade animal report about sea otters — so you know I love them! I hope you’ll love them too after learning about their magnificent fur (which almost led to their extinction) and their inspiring comeback, as well as some other reasons they’re important and interesting. After listening, search “sea otter photos and videos,” or use some of the links below, to see how cute they are.

Listen on Podbean:

Listen on YouTube:

Resources:

Oregon Encyclopedia: Sea Otter

12 facts about sea otters for Sea Otter Awareness Week (US Dept. of the Interior)

Sea otters crack open oysters and clams (YouTube video, Oregon Zoo)

The “extinct” sea otter swims back to life (Life Magazine, 20 June 1938 — click on page 30)

Lost and Found Nature: Searching for the southern sea otter

History of sea otters (Sea Otter Foundation & Trust)

Baby sea otter clip from https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=sea%20otter, recordist(s): Mimi DeGruy

Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0

Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):

Welcome to Nine Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.

[sea otter sounds]

That is a baby sea otter calling to its mom. I can’t decide if it’s cute or distressing. It kind of reminds me of my cat when he calls me for breakfast.

But anyway, I love sea otters and I’m going to tell you a little bit about why in a couple minutes.

What is a sea otter anyway? It’s a furry dark brown marine mammal who spends a lot of time lying on its back close to the North American Pacific coast, which makes it very easy to spot and observe if you’re there.

And I just got back from California where we saw a lot of sea otters. They come really close to the coast. They like to hang out in the kelp forest.

The kelp is attached to the bottom of the sea in pretty shallow waters, and the sea otters will sometimes wrap themselves around in the kelp. And sometimes they’re not attached to the kelp at all, but they’re again really close so you can see them, and sometimes you don’t even need binoculars, although binoculars do help.

People in the 18th and 19th centuries were also in awe of the sea otter because of its pelt. Sea otter fur was called “soft gold” and was the world’s most valuable pelt, and many people wanted coats made of sea otter fur, especially the Russian elite. And the pelts were also sold in China for the wealthy to wear or to make into belts and other clothing in exchange for silk, tea, porcelain, and other luxury Chinese goods. In the mid-18th century a pelt could fetch a hundred dollars in China or in Russia, and that would be about $5000 in today’s value. So of course the Russian, English, and American mariners on the Pacific coast wanted a piece of that action.

I chose the sea otter for a fourth-grade report about animals that we had to do because I’d seen many when I visited my grandmother in California, and I was in awe of how cute and interesting they are, of course having nothing to do with the historic value of sea otter fur.

So one point I can make is that clearly wonder and awe can depend not only on the beholder but also on the era and the culture. In general, people no longer think of sea otters because of the value of their fur or because they want to wear coats made of sea otter fur (fortunately, in my opinion). And fortunately for the sea otters, people today are mostly captivated by the sea otter’s cuteness and interesting behaviors and also by its inspiring comeback story, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

A little more about sea otters. They’re not to be confused with the river otter, right? The river otter is a smaller animal who lives in, you guessed it, rivers. And those are the ones who you see sliding down the chutes and playfully swimming really quickly in the freshwater. Sea otters live in the ocean, and 90% of them live in Alaska, but you can also see many in central California.

They are the largest member of the weasel family, but they’re the smallest marine mammal. And the most incredible thing about the sea otter, and of course this is why they were also popular a couple centuries ago, is that they have the thickest and densest fur of all animals. Not just of all marine animals, but of all animals. Their water-resistant fur has up to 1 million hairs per square inch, or about 500,000 hairs per square centimeter.

That’s incredible! Take a moment and think about how you can fit that many hairs into such a small space. This density of their hairs is what insulates them from the cold water.

Remember, most of them live in Alaska, and I’ve seen pictures of them surrounded by sea ice. They don’t have blubber like whales do and they actually have very little fat, so they need this thick, dense fur. But the thick, dense fur almost destroyed them because of the hunting.

Sea otters consume 25% of their body weight each day, and they’re an important keystone species. A keystone species means a species that is critical to how an ecosystem functions. It has a very large impact on the ecosystem, and if you take the keystone species away, a lot of trouble can be caused for other members of the ecosystem, both animals and plants.

So let me talk a little bit about sea otters’ relationship to the ecosystem. As I said a moment ago, they live in the kelp forest, and you can find some pictures of this beautiful underwater forest, which is the habitat for many other species, not just sea otters. It’s very diverse, and it absorbs carbon that would otherwise go into the air and contribute to climate change.

Now, sea otters don’t eat the kelp, but they do eat animals like sea urchins. And if there are no sea otters around to eat the sea urchins, guess what happens? The sea urchins will go to town eating the kelp, and there will be much less or no kelp. And then that carbon that the kelp is retaining will just go up into the air, contributing to climate change.

Okay, wait, you might be asking, how on earth does anyone eat a spiny sea urchin? Another incredible thing about sea otters is that they are one of the only mammals besides humans who use tools. They lay a rock on their chest and bash their hard-shelled food, like the sea urchins, against that rock, or they’ll take a sea urchin and bash it against rocks in the water. And you can see some cool videos of sea otters doing exactly that. It’s pretty impressive.

Okay, let’s go back. Let’s talk about how they almost went extinct.

They were almost hunted to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries, as I told you, because of their gorgeous luscious fur. There were only 2,000 sea otters left in the world by the turn of the 20th century. And people suspected that there may be a few here and there, but they didn’t really see them until a lighthouse keeper reported a small colony of sea otters off the California coast in 1915.

And then in 1938, a couple in Big Sur, which is a very rugged, rocky part of the central California coast, were testing a telescope, and they noticed a colony of about 50 sea otters in a very secluded area. And Life Magazine did a little feature about it with a photo. I’m going to share a link so you can see that photo too.

But this was incredible because almost nobody was seeing any sea otters. And this was the beginning of the sea otter revival. There had been a treaty in 1911 called the Fur Seal Treaty that also mentioned sea otters. And it started sea otter conservation by outlawing hunting, but it was limited. So sea otters had still been hunted. And then people started to become more aware of how great these animals are.

We don’t need to sell sea otter fur anymore to Russia and China or to wear our own sea otter coats. And with some other legislation much later in the 20th century, like the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the United States, and of course the Endangered Species Act, sea otters have really rebounded. Some native Alaskans are still allowed to make non-mass-produced indigenous crafts from sea otter pelts, but otherwise it’s totally forbidden to take a sea otter pelt or to hunt sea otters.

So sea otters are still endangered and they face many threats, including probably the biggest one is oil spills, which ruin their fur and cause them to die of hypothermia.

But another thing that brings me a sense of awe and wonder about sea otters is just the simple fact that they’ve come back from the brink of extinction. And of course, they’re not the only animal that’s done that, but this is an animal that I have seen many times and that I particularly love. I mean, I wrote the fourth-grade report about the sea otters, so you know I love sea otters! And just the idea that an animal can be almost extinct because of horrible things people have done, and then people can sometimes make decisions that actually benefit the animal.

Okay, so why should you care about sea otters if you’re not convinced already? You’ve seen how they benefit the ecosystem where they live and how they can play a small part in mitigating climate change. And their beautiful dense fur is indeed a marvel, especially when it’s on a playful living animal. So I think those are the reasons why you should love sea otters. Again, they’re also really cute, so please look up some sea otter videos to add to your experience of wonder today.

And I’ll share one or two sea otter videos in the notes here as well. If you ever get a chance to visit the California coast between Santa Barbara and Half Moon Bay or to visit coastal Alaska, which is gorgeous, then look for the sea otters. You will see them.

They’re not that hard to find. So enjoy your sea otter videos and photos, and I’ll talk to you next time.

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