I often say that if reincarnation is real, I want to come back as a sea otter. Sea otters don’t do anything unless it us fun. But I might be changing my mind about my second-life choice now that I realize that Orcas eat sea otters by the thousands. I mean, who wants to worry about being munched by a Killer Whale?
Most importantly, the sea otter population in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands has declined by ninety percent over the last twenty years. When combined with ocean acidification, it’s having a devastating effect on the ecosystem:
In the Aleutian’s delicate seascape, otters hold the entire ecosystem together. As they have disappeared, the rest of the local food web has started to crumble — a process that’s been accelerated and compounded by climate change, Dr. Estes and his colleagues report in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.
Without otters to keep them in check, populations of sea urchins have boomed, carpeting the sea floor in spiny spheres that mow down entire forests of kelp. Now, even the living, red-algae reefs on which the swirling stands of kelp once stood are in peril.
“These long-lived reefs are disappearing before our eyes,” said Doug Rasher, a marine ecologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine and the study’s first author.
Softened by warming and acidifying waters, the coral-like structures have quickly succumbed to the urchins’ tiny teeth, which can annihilate years of fragile algae in a single bite.
The findings point to the importance of otters in the Aleutians, where the marine mammals act not just as predators, but protectors, maintaining biological balance through their voracious appetites. A single sea otter can scarf down nearly 1,000 sea urchins a day. “They eat them like popcorn,” Dr. Estes said.
“The amount of things they control in this ecosystem is pretty astonishing,” said Anjali Boyd, a marine ecologist at Duke University who wasn’t involved in the study. “For their size and how cute they are, they are aggressive eaters.”
The main culprit here is human activity. Whalers have wiped out the Orcas’ favorite meals, so they’re eating the otters. Meanwhile, all the carbon dioxide we’re putting in the air winds up in the oceans where it weakens the coral and skeleton structures of sea-life. So, what was once a bustling region is almost bereft of life:
In 1970, Jim Estes made his first trek up to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. He was greeted by an ocean filled with furry faces.
Everywhere the young biologist looked, there were sea otters — lollygagging on kelp beds, shelling sea urchins, exchanging their signature squeals. Back then, crowds of these charismatic creatures shrouded the sprawling archipelago, congregating in “rafts and bunches, as many as 500 at once,” said Dr. Estes, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “There were so many of them, we couldn’t keep track.”
Now, Dr. Estes said, more than 90 percent of those otters are gone. In just a few decades, this bustling civilization has withered into a ghost town. “You can travel down 10 miles of coastline and never see an animal,” he said.
We’re doing this to ourselves, and there’s not much hope in sight outside of a positive outcome to the American presidential election. A Biden presidency would at least slow the rate at which we’re killing ourselves and all of nature’s other creatures.
Unless we get serious about global warming and habitat preservation, we’re screwed. The earth will eventually revive. Just without us and a ton of species we drive to extinction.
Minus a catastrophe that takes out 3/4 of the human population, it’s way too late to stop it.
We can slow it, but it’s too late to stop it. And no, that’s not a cop out.
Um, this picture is of an orca eating a baby seal, not a sea otter. And one of the fun things that sea otters do for fun is rape baby seals. Otherwise, they are truly a lynchpin species whose loss is catastrophic for kelp forest ecosystems, and they are truly cute.
In California, as you may know, the lack of kelp beds (maybe 90 percent depletion) are thought to be the reason for sea otters being over predated by white sharks. We’ve already fucked up nature; we need to also fund and support people who try to understand it.