Free Republic

Otter 841 is known as the elusive-surfboard stealing otter and she’s back to her old tricks, making her latest appearance in Santa Cruz, California during a surf contest Saturday. According to The Mercury News, Otter 841 is notorious among surfers after last summer’s wave-riding rampage, going after surfers and biting their surf boards. Surfer Karl Anderle says he was sitting on his board at the surfing contest as a volunteer, keeping non-competitors out of the competition zone. He says he tipped his board up, hoping she would hop off, but she scooted up and clung on so he decided he...

Officials at the Monterey Bay Aquarium are reporting seeing larger rafts of sea otters off of the Cannery Row area in Monterey. A raft is a group of sea otters resting in the kelp. “This is a really cool phenomenon that we don't typically see in this area. We have seen rafts of this size on the Peninsula but they are typically offshore,” Jessica Fujii, Sea Otter Program Manager for Monterey Bay Aquarium, said. Fujii says it appears to be more of a localized movement rather than a big migration. Usually, in this area, one can see anywhere from five...

The sea otters who call the Monterey Bay Aquarium home are rolling up their invisible sleeves to receive their COVID-19 vaccine. No sea otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium have tested positive for COVID. However, a group of Asian small-clawed otters at Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta all tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, back in April 2021. The aquarium says the animals all showed symptoms, including sneezing, runny noses, lethargy and coughing. There have also been deadly outbreaks among minks, who are cousins of the sea otter. Dr. Michael Murray, who is the Jane Dunaway Director of...

Sea otters are unique for being the only marine mammal to use stone tools. They often use rocks to crack open shells while floating on their back, and also sometimes use stationary rocks along the shoreline as "anvils" to crack open mollusks, particularly mussels. A joint project including the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the University of California, Santa Cruz, among others, has resulted in a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary study published in Scientific Reports, combining ten years of observations of sea otters with archaeological methods to analyze sea otter use of such...

It's something you'll only see in a place like Moss Landing. A recently-recorded video shows a female sea otter hopping across the road in a crosswalk that is clearly marked as "Sea Otter Xing." The sea otter crosswalk and traffic speed bump was built across Moss Landing Road in the winter of 2016 because a beloved otter, Mr. Enchilada, was run over by a car. The sea otter's death was witnessed by harbor workers and saddened locals. But would sea otters would actually know to use their new special crosswalk? Thanks to volunteers and employees with Sea Otter Savvy, the...

ST. LOUIS—Parasites from cat feces are causing deadly brain damage in California sea otters. A combination of toxic chemicals and herpes virus is killing off California sea lions. And toxic algae blooms are contributing to record manatee deaths in Florida. All of these animals live near coastlines, spending a majority of their lives in the same waters people swim and surf in. Their daily cuisines consist of the same foods we serve up in clam shacks and fine seafood restaurants. The difference between humans and these animals, says NOAA spokesperson Paul Sandifer, is that the animals deal with the ocean...