Status
Habitat
Range
Group
Remove it and the kelp forest becomes a barren in a decade.
Sea otters eat sea urchins; urchins eat kelp. Where otters were hunted out during the fur trade, urchin numbers exploded and grazed kelp forests down to bare rock — the observation that gave ecology its clearest working example of a keystone species. Where otters have returned, the kelp has returned with them, along with the fish, invertebrates and carbon storage the canopy supports.
They carry no insulating fat, so survival depends entirely on the densest fur of any animal — roughly a hundred thousand hairs per square centimetre — and on a metabolism running at two to three times the rate expected for their size. That means eating a quarter of their body weight daily, and it means an oil spill is lethal not by poisoning but by matting the coat.
The open shelf
More frames of the sea otter
Streamed live from the Commons Quality Images archive, eighteen at a time. Tap any frame to study it — each remains its photographer’s.
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