The Skull of the Otter: Alien Vs. Predator

So it's 2:20 in the morning, our Carbon monoxide alarm is going off, and the fire department is are their way. So that says to me it's time for another blog post!  For a long time now, I have been struck at how creepy looking the skull of the otter is!  Specifically the North American river otter (Lontra canadensis): it looks just like the head of the alien from the Alien movies!  Don't believe me?  Take a look below to see for yourself!

Now, not all otters have this terrifyingly creepy skull: the sea otter (Enhydra lutris), giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus), smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata), and a few of the other otters all have fairly normal looking skulls.  Their skulls all look more or less like the sea otter skull, pictured below.

There are some more otters that have that creepy Alien-looking skull going for them, though!  These otters include the marine otter (Lontra felina)....

....the southern river otter (Lontra provocax).....

....the Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra).....

....the hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana)....

....and last, but not least (and in my opinion, the most), the most Alien-looking of the bunch, the neotropical otter (Lontra longicaudis)!

These animals would have the elongated skull so that they are more streamlined when swimming in the water.  Their relatives, the weasels (also Mustelids), are often burrowing animals, or animals that have to squeeze through tight confines.  For these guys, too, the Alien-like head makes sense!

Otters of the Americas

Most scientists today accept that there are thirteen extant (still living, opposite of extinct) otters in the world.  Of these, five are native only to the Americas, while one, the sea otter, lives in both the Old World and the New World!  In this post, though, we are going to be only looking at the New World otters, the otters of the Americas!  Let's start up north and work our way downwards!

If we're starting up north, then that would mean that our first otter of the day is the North American river otter!  The diet of the river otter is primarily composed of slow moving, bottom feeding fish, but will eat many other different animals given the opportunity!  Reports of river otters catching and eating snowshoe hare have been recorded, as well!

When my friend Masaki Kleinkopf, my father and I were able to go on a behind the scenes tour at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo with my grandparents, one of the keepers at the grizzly bear enclosure told us a very interesting and funny story!  A few years ago, the four river otters had managed to create a hole in their enclosure large enough for them to squeeze through, and some of them escaped.  One of the river otters was never found, and to this day is still probably roaming the mountainside (unless it got eaten).  If I remember correctly, another one of the otters was captured a few weeks later farther down the mountain, swimming around.  The final two otters were much easier to capture, however, and this is the funny part of the story!  If I remember correctly, the zookeepers figured out that the otters were missing because they went up and visited the nearby grizzly bear enclosure.  Instead of being greeted with the typical blue pond loaded with fish, they were met with a vision of a bloodbath: the waters were red with blood, and there were fish parts everywhere!  And there, on the side of the pond, were two fat and happy otters!

In other river otter news, one was recently captured on a camera trap in Boulder, Colorado, the first such sighting in the area for around 100 years!  Click HERE to be directed to an article to learn more!

Next up, we have the sea otter, the heaviest mustelid, and the only other otter native to North America!  Sea otters also have the thickest fur of any mammal, with around an astonishing ONE MILLION HAIRS PER SQUARE INCH!  Now THAT'S a lot of hairs!  This unfortunately has attracted many, many poachers over the years, and sea otter populations the world over took a serious tumble.  However, in recent years, they have recovered to around two thirds their historical numbers, making it one of the most successful marine conservation movements ever!  The sea otter will also hold hands with other sea otters to avoid floating away from each other, and sometime will form what scientists call "rafts" of around 2,000 individuals!  Click HERE to learn more about the hand holding and the rafts!

Let's take this trip south of the Equator to Mexico, Central, and South America!  The next otter is the neotropical otter and, as you can see by the range map below, is native to all three of those places!  A solitary animal, not a great deal is known about its behavior and habits.

Next up is the second largest mustelid in the world (after the sea otter, of course), the aptly named giant otter!  Although much longer than the sea otter, the giant otter is much more slim.  It is, however, the longest mustelid, growing to lengths of about five and a half feet!  Unlike most mustelids, the giant otter is a fairly social animal, living in groups generally numbering between around four and thirteen individuals, usually composed of one pair of breeding individuals and their offspring from one or more generations.

One of the most interesting things that I have learned about the giant otter is entirely and categorically false: according to one TV show (I am pretty sure it was Survivorman), the giant otter is a threat to people.  I can't remember the exact quote, but in one episode in which he was in the Amazon, he says something along the lines of "I definitely have to watch out for jaguars and insects here, but I've also been told to watch out for the highly aggressive giant otter."  Which is total crap.  The giant otter is often regarded as a nuisance to indigenous peoples, but nowhere have I been able to find anyone saying that they can be dangerous to humans!  I don't recommend that show.

The second to last otter of the Americas is the marine otter.  Much of the marine otter's time is spent out of water, and it rarely, if ever, ventures into rivers or estuaries.  The marine otter is the second smallest otter (the only smaller otter being the Asian small-clawed otter), and, like the neotropical otter, not a lot is known about it.

Finally, we have the southern river otter, another otter about which not a great deal is know.  Although called a river otter, the southern river otter spends a great deal of time in both fresh and salt water.  Some people believe the southern river otter simply to be a sub-species of the North American river otter.

This was the birthday post of Julie Neher! Happy birthday, Julie! Want to see some cute (or ugly) baby animals featured here on your birthday? Well, if you have a birthday coming up, just email me the date at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com with the date and your favorite animal, and I will do my best to get a post in! And if you like what you are reading, please feel free to follow us here or via Facebook!

Animal Questions #1: Jurassic Park Reality, Sea Otter Hand Holding, and the Great Auk Extinction

So I've started a new video series in which I answer questions about animals that you guys have.  I finished Episode 1 today, and if you click on the link below you can watch it, too!

CLICK HERE TO LEARN THE ANSWERS.

I decided I would also write out the questions and answers here, just in case some of you would rather read the questions and answers, instead!  So here they are, in all of their glory and splendor!

1. Could people actually clone dinosaurs and make a real life Jurassic Park?

Ever since the fantastic book Jurassic Park came out in 1990, people started to wonder: could this actually happen? Could we actually bring dinosaurs to life via the miracle of cloning? Following the release of the movie in 1993, the idea was on the mind of even more people. Sadly, (or perhaps fortunately), from what we understand about DNA at this point, we simply cannot clone dinosaurs, not even by using mosquitos trapped in amber. DNA is a very fragile molecule, and does not take all that long to break down. Sure, mammoth mummies frozen in the permafrost in Siberia have successfully yielded DNA. Mammoths, however, only went extinct several thousand years ago. From a geological standpoint, mammoths, you and I lived practically at the same time as each other, when compared to how long ago the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Furthermore, the permafrost has acted as a freezer, helping to preserve the DNA in ideal conditions for scientists to extract it from the mammoth at a later date. So to sum up? To the best of our knowledge, Jurassic Park: not happening. However, Pleistocene or Ice Age Park may not be all that far off!

2. Why do sea otters hold hands while they’re sleeping?

Sea otters often do this to keep themselves from drifting apart from other sea otters. Although adult sea otters generally forage for food by themselves, they will often form large groups, called “rafts,” sometimes numbering as many as 2,000 individuals. When in these rafts, to avoid floating apart from each other, they will sometimes hold hands. They will also sometimes tie themselves to kelp when they are sleeping or feeding to keep from floating away, as well.

3. Why did the great auk go extinct?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the great auk (Pinguinus impennis), this penguin-like creature (a product of convergent evolution) inhabited the North Atlantic Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere, and became extinct mid-way through the 1800s. The great auk was intensely hunted by humans in European waters for their down feathers, (which were actually used in both pillows and hats), as well as for food. (Not the down feathers, mind you, but the meat of the bird and its eggs). It wasn't until 1553, around the time that the nesting sites of the great auk had been all but eliminated on the European side of the Atlantic, that the great auk first became officially protected. In 1775, people who had broken a law forbidding people from killing the great auk for its feathers were actually beaten publicly! Following the local extinction of the great auk in Greenland in 1815, the sole remaining breeding site of the great auk was a small, volcanic island. Off of the coast of Iceland, the island was dubbed "Geirfuglasker," after the Norse term for "great auk," "Geirfugl." In 1830, however, the great auk population on Geirfuglasker came under siege by two elemental forces that it had no hopes of combating: an underwater volcanic eruption and a subsequent earthquake, which combined to destroy the island, terminating most of the rest of the great auks. That’s not to say that the volcanic eruption and volcano are to blame: humanity definitely takes the bullet for that one.

If you have any questions yourself, ask me here at the blog, email me at cuyvaldar123946@gmail.com, comment below the video, or tweet them at me @TNaturalWorld1. Thanks for watching/reading/whatever you did!

Seals and Sea Otters in Monterey Bay

Right after my family and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, we went out to eat at a Bubba Gump on the dock.  As we looked out at the bay, we saw a seal pop its head up out of the water!  We took a bunch of pictures, but it wasn't long before it disappeared beneath the waves again.  After looking at the pictures, I came to the conclusion that it was not, in fact, a seal, but actually a sea otter!  My bad.

The seal that's not really a seal but actually a sea otter

After a few more minutes, one of us suddenly realized that not all of the lumps of floating kelp out there were actually kelp: some of them were actually wild sea otters!  It was really, really cool!  Being a native Coloradoan, a sea otter is pretty exotic, especially a wild one!  Here are a bunch of pictures that my mother and I took!

A wild sea otter!

The sea otters are off to the right, not the thing right in the center of the photo, that is a kelp thing

The sea otter is a little below and to the left of center

The group of three little dots in the middle-ish of the photo, as well as the little dot thing off to the right of the picture (almost out of the shot) are all sea otters.  The other random dot, to the left of the three other dots, is the same lump of kelp that is in the photo two above this one.

The sea otter-looking dot in the a bit above the center of the photo is the sea otter

Carmel on Dwellable

Aquarium Spotlight: Monterey Bay Aquarium

When my family and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, we saw a ton of really cool things!  So let's take a look at some pictures of some of these animals now in our very first....Aquarium Spotlight!  First off, the sea otters!  They were really super cute and were swimming ALL over the enclosure, as it was feeding time, and some of the zookeepers were doing a feeding demonstration with training.

 

 

 

 

 

Sea otters weren't all that they had, though!  Another thing that the Monterey Bay Aquarium had was a pretty good jellyfish exhibit.

 

 

 

They also had one of my most favorite animals, the African penguin!

 

 

They also had a few fairly large tanks too, with large schools of fish that looked super amazing and really pretty.  My mom tried to get some good shots of them, but it was dark and they didn't really come out super well.

 

 

 

 

Finally, the other main thing that I thought was worthy of mention were the sea turtles, they had some pretty cool sea turtles!

 

 

 

 

Photo credit for all of these pictures goes to Julie Neher.

Monterey on Dwellable

Georg Wilhelm Steller

As of tomorrow, a man named Georg Wilhelm Steller passed away 266 years ago.  Steller, as we talked about a few weeks ago, discovered a few very interesting animals, and was the first non-native (at least that we know of) to set foot in Alaska, in 1741.  He was therefore the first European naturalist to discover, as well as describe, a number of animals in the area.

Many of the members of the crew of the boat that he was on were coming down with scurvy, and Steller attempted to cull the growing epidemic by feeding berries and leaves to the crew.  No one really heeded his advice, which was why, on the returning journey, they all became shipwrecked, as only 12 crew members were actually able to physically move.  During the voyage almost half of the crew had died due to scurvy, and many, including the captain, died following the shipwreck.  With very little food and water, the survivors created a camp, suffering frequent raids by the arctic fox, which only served to increase their peril.

Nevertheless, Steller, apparently the stoic type, continued to learn more about the natural world of Alaska.  He recorded a good deal of information in regards to the Steller's sea cow (a relative of the manatee), which, as a species, only survived about 25 years after Steller first discovered them.  Other animals that he discovered, described, or both include the Steller's eider (a type of duck), the spectacled cormorant (like the sea cow, now extinct), the sea otter, Steller's sea lion, and the northern fur seal.

In 1742, the survivors were eventually able to build a new boat from the salvage, and returned to Avacha Bay in Russia.  Steller continued to explore the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia for the next two years, but died in 1746 in transit to St. Petersburg.

One final thing that I find interesting about Steller has to do with the post-mortem publication of his journals.  They were published by the German zoologist and biologist Peter Simon Pallas who, you guessed it, is the namesake of the Pallas cat, or Pallas's cat, who was the first person to describe the animal in 1776.  These journals proved to be useful to other explorers of the same region such as Captain Cook.

An excellent picture that I took of the Pallas cat (if I do say so myself) from the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo

Chiniak on Dwellable