Carlos Rio's "Happy Sea Otter Eating Shellfish at Seward, AK"

This is a Sea Otter we saw about 50 feet from the road to our campsite, just outside the city of Seward. For our 2 days there we saw him there every time we passed. But that is not un-expected. They eat 1/4 their body weight in food a day and can weigh 90 pounds. But as you can see, they have to work hard to suck all the meat out of those shells. They are very common to see these days. But in the17 and 1800's the Russians almost hunted them into extinction because their fur keeps you the warmest of all animal (well,perhaps less than the muskox). They have no blubber (unlike all other marine mammals like seals, sea lions and whales). A ranger told me they have 1 million hairs per inch (was he putting me on?). In 1911 they say there were only 2,000 in the Alaskan waters. In the 1960s they got a program to get them re-populated into the wild. By a decade they had 160,000. Now they are all over. If there is kelp, there live their prey and there they are. Some claim they are the cause of the loss of the abalone, sea cucumbers, sea urchin and geofish as commercial fisheries. Well. if you ask me, success of one species means decline of their prey.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• Carlos Rio's
• Sea Otter
• Seward
• Kodiak
• Alaska
• AK