SECRET SEX LIVES OF OTTERS
Cute creatures can harbour aberrant sexual tendencies.
Whiskers wasn’t your average sea otter.
Rather than hang out with his own kind off Nootka Island on the west coast of Vancouver Island, he would often come ashore to socialize with humans.
He’d crawl onto the lap or around the neck of the assistant lightkeeper’s 14- year- old son, Gabe, and would even go after balls tossed into the ocean.
Sure, he was adorable. But Whiskers’ behaviour also troubled Ed and Pat Kidder, who served 44 years on “the lights” before retiring in 2003.
“He was a real cute little guy,” Pat recalls from their current home near Qualicum Beach. “But he’s a wild critter and you don’t know what he’s likely to do. Those teeth can crack an oyster shell.”
Whiskers also used to tease the dogs from the neighbouring First Nations reserve at Friendly Cove, where British explorer Captain James Cook made first contact in 1778 and the commercial slaughter of sea otters ensued shortly thereafter.
Whiskers would whistle from the water in the mornings so that the dogs would run to the shoreline and bark at him. The Kidders described them as “northern dogs” with husky blood: Nipper, Killer and Tuk, the biggest and oldest of the three at an estimated 10 years of age.
One day the dogs were down by the rocks barking and Whiskers pushed a log toward them, daring them to jump onto it and come even closer.
Pat recalls thinking: “‘ Don’t go out on there or he’ll have you and you’ll wind up dead.’ Whiskers was a smart animal.”
None of the dogs fell for it. Not then, at least. A dark cloud
Oh, they look adorable, like stuffed animals.’ But they definitely have the potential for being strong and aggressive.
BRIAN SHEEHAN VANCOUVER AQUARIUM’S MARINE MAMMAL CURATOR
descended on the cove a couple of days later. The Kidders heard more commotion and cast their eyes toward a ramp on a wharf. Tuk was floating in the water — drowned.
Whiskers was there, too, copulating with the carcass while parading past the other two wildly barking dogs.
“He’d go back and forth, holding Tuk’s head up out of the water,” Pat relates. “He was humping it. It was so bizarre. We had never anticipated anything like that.”
Who would? After all, cute and cuddly — not rapist and murderer — are mentioned in the typical bio on sea otters.
The Vancouver Aquarium, for one, has effectively used the charismatic species as a powerful marketing tool over the years. Remember the 2007 YouTube video of two otters “holding hands” in their tank? Almost 20 million viewers at last count.
The aquarium also goes to great lengths to save sea otters, including the rescue last October of Wally, blinded by shotgun pellets near Tofino. It took numerous surgeries, including for a fractured flipper and broken teeth, but Wally survived. Total cost: $ 30,000 in staff time, medicine, supplies and food.
“That’s one thing we have with our visitors: ‘ Oh, they look adorable, like stuffed animals,’” explains Brian Sheehan, the aquarium’s marine mammal curator. “But they definitely have the potential for being strong and aggressive.”
Indeed, a disturbing darkness lurks beneath the sea otter’s public image.
The incident with Whiskers happened almost 30 years ago, and is by no means an isolated incident of interspecies, or misdirected, sex involving male sea otters.
Brian Gisborne operates a commercial water- taxi service in summer for hikers on the West Coast Trail and also works for the Canadian government on contract, keeping an eye out for marine mammals on the west coast. In 2005 he was off Long Beach when he came across Rocky, a sea otter known for hanging out with Steller sea lions.
On this day, it was a cormorant seabird that caught Rocky’s attention. “He tried to copulate with it,” says Gisborne, noting the bird was drowned. “He held it and you could see what was going on.
“I knew what sea otters are like. It didn’t surprise me. I don’t think that it was isolated.”
Gisborne reported the incident and submitted photos to Linda Nichol, a sea otter biologist with the federal fisheries department in Nanaimo.
Almost a decade later, she continues to try to make sense of the incident. “Why would a behaviour like this persist? Well, there’s no evolutionary disadvantage, so it could. It’s an aberrant behaviour with no obvious negative consequence for the otter. I’ve heard, anecdotally, people saying they’ve seen it with harbour seal pups in B. C. as well.”
Researchers in California documented 19 cases of sexual behaviour between male sea otters and juvenile harbour seals in Monterey Bay from 2000 to 2002.
At least three different male otters were observed “harassing, dragging, guarding and copulating” with harbour seals up to seven days after death by drowning. The carcasses of 15 seals were recovered, showing evidence of severe trauma, including both vaginal and rectal.
The California study, published in the journal Aquatic Mammals, describes one incident in which a seal was resting on shore when an otter approached and bit it on the nose and flipped it over. The two wound up in the water and 105 minutes into the encounter “the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming.”
Two of the male otters involved in the California attacks were identified by flipper tags. One had been stranded as a pup and rehabilitated at Monterey Bay Aquarium before release; it had been observed in attacks on six seals. The other was an older male that had been stranded after being wounded by another male; it had been treated and released after eight weeks.
The California study suggested an imbalance between males and females may cause some to divert their aggressions. In otter populations, where males establish a dominance hierarchy based on age, sex and fitness, subdominant males may have limited access to receptive females of the same species, which could cause them to look elsewhere.
Yes, even to dogs.