Sea Otter - The Basics

Sea Otter

(Enhydra lutris)

As promised, the posts this week are brief overviews of EACH of the otter species, focusing on recent information about each species and a vid or 2...

This species lives in the ocean, along the coast of the North pacific, enjoy! :)

Sea Otters spend their entire lives in the ocean, only leaving the water in the case of extremely bad storms. They are also one of the known tool-using mammals, using rocks to break shells open so they can consume the shellfish inside. It is important that they are able to do this well because they have to eat about 30% of their body weight every day!



Status: Endangered and Decreasing


The Sea Otter range traditionally rimmed the outlying land/islands of the northern Pacific Ocean from Baja Mexico around Japan; currently they are restricted to the sporadic range shown in tan below.

Sea Otters at Seattle Aquarium, eating, playing, cleaning, and watching the tourists!

Live WILD Sea Otter mom giving birth near Monterey Bay Aquarium

PBS's NATURE on Sea Otters

Another PBS documentary, thsi time from Jean-Michel Cousteau!

If you want more in-depth reading a few research articles you could explore on these otters includes:

>   Prey choice and habitat use drive sea otter pathogen exposure in a resource-limited coastal system

CK Johnson, MT Tinker, JA Estes… - Proceedings of the …, 2009 - National Acad Sciences

>   Southern sea otter as a sentinel of marine ecosystem health,DA Jessup, M Miller, J Ames, M Harris, C Kreuder… - EcoHealth, 2004 - Springer
>   Foraging patterns and prey selection in an increasing and expanding sea otter population,KL Laidre, RJ Jameson - Journal of Mammalogy, 2006 - BioOne
> Gene transcription in sea otters (Enhydra lutris); development of a diagnostic tool for sea otter and ecosystem health, L Bowen, AK Miles, M Murray… - Molecular ecology …, 2012

Jellyfish Day presents Mastigias papua! (the spotted lagoon jelly)

The Spotted Lagoon Jelly, has multiple mouth openings on each of it's 4 oral arms (see those things that look like odd tentacles? those are oral arms), instead of a single central mouth opening.
The lagoon jelly is greenish brown in color due to the crop of symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) it grows in its tissues, which produces food for the jelly to harvest. It also catches about 30% of it's food with it's oral arms.
 Sometimes mall fish live inside of the jellies!

It is also known as "lagoon jelly", is found in bays and lagoons in the tropical zone of the Pacific Ocean.
This particular jelly was filmed at Seattle Aquarium.

These jellies live 3 to 4 months and are most active from summer to early fall.

The life cycle and anatomy of jellies will be discussed in another post!

For best viewing go to our YouTube channel and change video settings to 1080 HD.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
©Danaan DeNeve / Chiara DeNeve, 1999-current

Water Cycle #1 (fill in the gaps) > National Water Week! (April 10- 16)

This week is (U.S.) National Water Week.
A week to focus on water topics at our national level: clean water access, water recycling, wise water use, natural water flows, agricultural access, recreation, flooding, drought...

Want to know more about water, and how it impacts us? This week we'll explore some of those topics.

Here's a blank template... how do you think the water cycle works?

(we'll post a completed version later this week ;) )

or, if you prefer:

Join us to celebrate World Water Week August 27- September 2 (2016).