SEA OTTER

One of the smallest marine mammals, the sea otter is native to the coasts of the northern and eastern North Pacific Ocean. Their numbers were once estimated to be as many as 300,000, but hunting in the 18th and 19th centuries reduced populations significantly, with the most recent estimates putting the worldwide total at around 125,000. Today, sea otters face the threat of oil pollution, getting entangled in fishery nets and predation by orcas as well as humans through poaching. Without a layer of blubber to keep warm, sea otters depend on their thick fur but when their fur is soaked with oil, it loses its ability to retain air and they die quickly from hypothermia. Their kidneys, liver and lungs also get damaged after they ingest the oil when grooming. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 killed thousands of sea otters in Prince William Sound in the Gulf of Alaska. In the former Soviet Union, poaching was a serious threat, but today, the most stable and secure part of the sea otter’s range is Russia.

I’ve come across sea otters in the Pacific Ocean along the Kamchatka Peninsula shore in Russia. Usually, I’ve had encounters with one or two but one day in Vilyuchinskaya Bay, while working with biologists who research orcas there, we met a huge colony of sea otters together. I think there were more than 100.