#Protect the oceans or the Lorax will come for your knees

[clonedchaos]

Happy Sea Otter Awareness Week! 🎉 🦦

Who knew? It’s Sea Otter Awareness Week!

I’m honored to share a birthday week with one of my favorite animal species, and I wanted to take a bit of time to yap about them— I’m an animal caretaker at heart, what can I say?

So what are Sea Otters exactly? They’re carnivores for one, mostly preying on hard mussels, crustaceans, and even urchins. They’re intelligent enough to use tools such as rocks or their sharpened canines to break open these hardy delicacies. Have you seen the action before? It’s adorable!

Pretty practical for an animal without opposable thumbs, huh?

Speaking of their prey, did you know sea otters are actually known as a keystone species? Kelp forests thrive in the ocean, producing around 50% of the earth’s oxygen! Cool, right? Unfortunately, purple urchins love to chow down on the bases of kelp, causing them to break off and die. These forests provide shelter, oxygen, and food for its diverse species that call it home. Without them, the ecosystem itself falls apart.

Fortunately, sea otters find no problem in having an urchin feast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Sea Otters also lack blubber. Instead, they have millions of tiny hairs clustered together to help them thermoregulate their bodies. Their whiskers, called vibrissae, help them detect prey that they might not otherwise see with their eyes. This is due to vibrations in the water.

Sea Otters also give birth to one pup at a time, given the high demands and dangers of the ocean. Fun fact— the mother will sometimes wrap her pup in kelp like a seat belt and leave to find prey. That way the little one won’t wander off and mom knows they’ll be right where she left them.

The bond between mother and pup is strong. They’ll even take in orphans and raise them as their own in rehabilitation scenarios.

Usually, males stay apart from the females, while the females stay with the pups. Sometimes they’ll aggregate in one area and form what we call “rafts”. They hold hands so they don’t float away from one another. :)

You can typically tell females apart from the males if the otter has scratches on her nose. For some reason, the males typically bite the female’s nose for courtship purposes— definitely not a way to get a girlfriend in our society, but it works for the otters I guess.

Sea Otters spend about 10% of their day— or around 2 hours— rubbing oil onto their fur. This oil is made in their sebaceous glands and is completely natural. It serves to keep their fur water proof; the water rolls right off! Many birds have similar behaviors.

Perhaps the most silly fact I learned about them was that sea otters have “armpit pockets” to store extra food in.

Human adaptations are so lame in comparison imo.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be an animal learning session if we didn’t talk about the sad reality of our climate and the planet. Sea Otters are threatened by oil spills, boating accidents, and habitat loss; amongst quite a few others.

With such a rapidly warming climate, toxic algal blooms can spring up on the coasts; in part due to fertilizer runoff entering our oceans. These blooms are toxic to many species, sea otters included. This messes with their neurological functions to the point they forget to do basic necessities to keep themselves alive.

So, do your part to limit your carbon footprint by recycling, eating sustainable fish, using non-chemical fertilizers, keeping our beaches clean, and please DO NOT APPROACH A SEA OTTER!

Yes yes I know they’re adorable, believe me. But it is literally illegal to touch or disturb one. Keep our furry friends safe and admire from a distance.

Enough with the doom and gloom, have some silly little sea otter pictures:

THEY USE THEIR STOMACHS AS TABLES, STOP— 😭😭😭😭😭😭