otters

Researchers have documented a dramatic decrease in creekbank and marsh edge erosion, up to 90%, in the Elkhorn Slough of Monterey County, attributable to the restored sea otter population. A sea otter in the estuarine water of Elkhorn Slough, Monterey Bay, California, USA. Credit: Killiii YuyanThe reintroduction of sea otters in Central California significantly slows erosion, offering a promising, low-cost approach to coastal ecosystem conservation.In a groundbreaking study published today in Nature, scientists reveal…

Watching sea otters sleep and cuddle as they float may be cute. Watching them eat — jaws cracking and tearing open shellfish, slurping the insides — is a different story. A new study published in the journal Nature says these predators' voracious appetite may be helping make a salt marsh in California more climate-resilient."They eat a lot. They eat about a quarter to a third of their body weight every single day," explained Tim Tinker, a research ecologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and one of the…

The return of sea otters, a top predator, to a California estuary is helping slow erosion and restore the estuary’s degraded geology. A sea otter in the estuarine water of Elkhorn Slough, Monterey Bay, California, USA. Credit: Killiii YuyanOtters prey on crabs, giving shoreline plants a chance to spread their roots,In the several decades since sea otters began to recolonize their former habitat in Elkhorn Slough, a salt marsh-dominated coastal estuary in central California, remarkable changes have occurred in the…

New observations of wolves hunting marine mammals in Alaska’s Katmai National Park challenge existing views on wolf diets, revealing a significant shift from land-based to marine prey. This groundbreaking research underscores wolves’ role in coastal ecosystems and paves the way for further ecological studies. Above is a wolf with a sea otter on Alaska’s Katmai coast. Credit: Kelsey GriffinFirsthand accounts of wolves hunting and successfully capturing a harbor seal, and another instance of a wolf pack preying on and…

When a large earthquake shook Alaska's Aleutian Islands in 2014, scientists with the US government hurried to assess the damage on Amchitka Island. They were looking for leaking radiation from underground nuclear tests performed decades before.During the first half of the 20th century, the remote island had been a wildlife preserve, until the US government converted it into a nuclear test site.Three atomic weapons went off at Amchitka in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the largest underground detonation the US…

Otter.ai just announced Otter Chat, an AI chatbot This “collaborative AI intelligence” acts as a help center for anyone participating in the meeting, transcribing meeting data and winnowing it down into an actual conversation. This allows it to accurately answer questions about the meeting that just transpired, in case you were busy doing important work stuff like, uh, playing the new Zelda just out of frame. The cheekily-named OtterPilot chatbot does more than just summarize meetings. It collaborates with everyone…

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Scientist Melissa Miller was seeing something in California sea otters that she had not seen before: an unusually severe form of toxoplasmosis, which officials have confirmed has killed at least four of the animals.“We wanted to get the word out. We’re seeing something we haven’t seen before, we want people to know about it and we want people working on marine mammals to be aware of these weird findings,” said Miller, a wildlife…

Sea otters swim together in the Pacific Ocean. A deadly, newly detected strain of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii is threatening sea otters, and potentially other species. Credit: Laird Henkel, CDFWA rare type of toxoplasma infection poses a danger to marine wildlife.According to a study by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the University of California, Davis, four sea otters that washed ashore in California died from a highly uncommon and severe form of toxoplasmosis. The disease was caused by the…

Melissa Miller knew something was off when she began to examine a sea otter that had died in San Simeon, a coastal California town about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the winter of 2020. Nearly all of the animal’s body fat was inflamed. “It felt like there were little bumps all through it,” she says—a condition the veterinary pathologist had never seen in her 25 years examining sea otters for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. She…

Although wolves in Alaska will eat just about anything that moves, their typical main course consists of deer, deer, and more deer. But when wolves on one island off the state’s coast finished off nearly all the deer around them, they turned to a surprising substitution: sea otters. That’s the conclusion of a new study that records a rare instance of a wolf population persisting without large terrestrial prey such as moose or deer. It also highlights the…