How the Otter Half Lives

Sea otters live almost exclusively at sea. They often sleep with kelp fronds draped across their chests as make-shift anchors. Sea otter recovery continues to face challenges and many conservation tools are required to help bring this species back to historic levels. Ocean Conservancy Magazine, Spring 2009Story by Andrew MyersOn March 19, 1938, Howard Granville Sharpe was peering through a telescope at the waters below his ranch near Big Sur, California. Spotting some life moving among the yellow-brown kelp fronds lying at the surface, he focused in. A seal or a sea lion, he was sure. A walrus perhaps, but, then again, he could see no tusks. Floating on its back; shoes-on-the-wrong-feet hind legs projecting into the air; forelegs folded smugly across its chest; a face "like a muskrat"—it was definitely not any of the usual suspects. It couldn't be an otter, Sharpe thought squarely, the last had been dead a hundred years. The authorities and the press weren't much help, dismissing his reports as the naiveté of a layman. Eventually though, the Fish and Wildlife man came. After a glimpse through the telescope he raised his head. He cleaned the lens and adjusted the eyepiece. Retraining the scope, his body grew taught. A whisper slipped across his lips, "Sea otters."Don't Call It a ComebackLazarus indeed. After a century, a beloved species long thought extinct was alive in California. In truth, the otters had likely dwindled to 50 or so, but had never actually been extinct. Despite that, the discovery was no less incredible. In the days and years following, like the penitent to Lourdes, the curious came to Big Sur to witness sea otters risen from the dead. In scientific magnitude, this was like discovering a dodo on Catalina Island or a passenger pigeon at your window during morning coffee. In recorded human history plenty of creatures have entered into extinction, but never a four-legged creature and certainly none quite like, or as beloved, as the sea otter. Since Sharpe's discovery, California sea otters have been a symbol of hope for conservationists everywhere. Today, thanks in large measure to efforts like California's Marine Life Protection Act and the National Marine Sanctuaries Act—policies shaped in large part by the work of Ocean Conservancy—the sea otter population along California's coast has grown, if ever so slowly. It is difficult not to be taken in by the sea otters' seemingly carefree lives. First off, they are best known for floating supinely in the most lackadaisical of swimming styles, the backstroke. It seems their natural state. They eat, sleep, groom themselves, and even tend to their young in this manner. That they live almost exclusively on the water connotes a deeper sense of floating through life, borne by the waves wherever they might go. They can be seen on occasion sleeping with a kelp frond draped across their chests as a makeshift anchor. Sea otters are incredibly gregarious, too. Like the flotilla Sharpe witnessed back in 1938, they like to drift together, locked forepaw to forepaw, in "rafts" that number from a few into the thousands. Their play is aggressive, but, like young boys on a playground, seems designed to instill the larger lessons of life guised as fun. Mating is another story. Otter males are violent, even nasty, and females are sometimes seriously injured.Hair Is LifeThen, of course, there is the grooming. Sea otters are obsessed with their luxuriant fur coats—known as a "pelage" to biologists. They constantly rub and clean their thick coats, teasing out natural oil that helps to seal out water. They groom with a tenacity that borders on obsession. Mothers ceaselessly stroke their young and blow air into their fur as if puffing on a balloon. It was the fur that led to their demise, of course. For centuries it was prized across the globe. In texture, it isexquisite, the densest on Earth. The average human head has about 100,000 hairs in total. A sea otter, by comparison, can have close to a million … per square inch. That's ten human heads of hair for every square inch of their four-foot frames.For the sea otter, hair is life. Like polar bears, the sea otter's coat has two layers. The longer, sparser "guard" hairs cover a denser, downy layer of insulating hair known as "pile." The obsession with grooming is truly a matter of survival, for the sea otter lacks blubber. No blubber is no matter so long as they tend to their coats. The incessant fluffing and massaging forces air into the pile and cleans it, providing a critical barrier between skin and the cold waters of the North Pacific.Unclean pelage is less effective as insulation, leading to hypothermia and possibly death. Oil spills, too, are particularly lethal to otters, and quick response is critical to the animals' survival. Oil in the fur leads to dangerous loss of buoyancy that can cause drowning. Then, if the otters try to clean the fur themselves, toxic substances in the oil lead to poisoning.As insulation, air is quite effective, beating blubber four-to-one. The absence of blubber has other consequences, however. Without a thick layer of fat the sea otter has no way to store calories against famine. They must eat … and eat … and eat. Sea otters consume in the range of 30 percent of their body weight every single day—so much for a life of leisure. So high is the sea otter's metabolism that its liver weighs twice that of any comparably sized mammal. It has to be big in order to keep up with the constant flow of food to its body. Its kidneys, too, are larger than one might expect because the sea otter drinks salt water.For all the sea otters' traits, however, they are perhaps best known for their unique feeding techniques. They are true tool-users, employing rocks to smash open the tough abalone and urchins that are among their main sources of food. They rest a stone on their chests and repeatedly smash the prey against it until it cracks. They consume the meat and toss the inedible bits aside. On dives to the bottom, sea otters benefit from marsupial-like pouches of skin under their forepaws and forelegs. The pouches in the forepaws are used to hold tools the otters use at the bottom to dislodge prey, which then fit neatly in the larger pouches on the forelegs.Help the KelpThe sea otter's voracious appetite has raised them to the status of "keystone species" in regions where they live, especially California and the Aleutians. By their mere presence, sea otters can reshape the character of an entire ecosystem. They hunger for sea urchins, which feed on kelp. By keeping the urchins in check, they help the kelp survive. Coastal areas of California with no otters are awash in urchins and devoid of kelp. Where otters live, kelp abounds and with it so do countless other species that depend on the kelp's sheltering arms.The fate of the sea otter is thus entwined with the very future of California's coasts. Although the California sea otter population has risen slowly since 1938, it still numbers about 2,750, a precarious figure. A single oil spill could wipe out a large portion of the population. The Exxon Valdez spill killed some 2,000 sea otters in Alaska. Ocean Conservancy and other conservation organizations have worked hard in California to move marine shipping farther offshore and into designated "vessel traffic lanes" to reduce the likelihood of collisions and oil spills, to prevent or restrict new offshore oil and gas exploration, and to improve oil spill response measures. These efforts are aimed at ensuring that disasters, like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska and the recent spill in San Francisco Bay, never happen again.We are likewise working to protect the habitats, food chains, and ecosystems sea otters rely on through adoption of a groundbreaking network of Marine Protected Areas in California's coastal waters and by improving protections in California's national marine sanctuaries. Healthy, resilient nearshore habitat improves the sea otters' ability to withstand disease and parasites.Fulcrum of LifeSea otter recovery continues to face challenges and many conservation tools are required to help bring this species back to historic levels. "Marine Protected Areas—like those being designed and implemented under the Marine Life Protection Act—are one tool that can help otters. Marine Protected Areas can limit human disturbance of sea otters, safeguard their habitat, help protect the food web that is so clearly important to their survival, and reduce sea otter entanglement in fishing gear," says Kaitilin Gaffney, director of Pacific ecosystem protection for Ocean Conservancy. "By protecting the shellfish the otters eat and the kelp they use for shelter, Marine Protected Areas can directly benefit sea otters."Lastly, what of those irresistible faces, staring back at a world that had given them up for dead with the "don't you wish you were me" indifference of the nouveau riche? No amount of anthropomorphism will change the fact that the sea otter is neither nouveau, nor riche, and what appears to us to be an easy, carefree life is in fact a surprisingly tough existence spent on the razor-edged fulcrum of life.Ocean Conservancy