“Current sea otter populations are at carrying capacity,”
May 23, 2019 9:38 PM   Subscribe

Sea otters are bouncing back - and into the jaws of great white sharks The sharks aren’t actually trying to eat the otters, preferring calorie-dense, blubbery prey like seals and sea lions. The bites are merely investigative, with sharks recoiling with a mouth of fur instead of a fatty meal. But such bites often cause mortal injuries to the otters, and they’re now happening more often off California’s beaches. posted by ActingTheGoat (12 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
they are sooooo cuuuuuuuttteeeeeee
posted by batter_my_heart at 11:43 PM on May 23, 2019


Otters are delicious!
posted by hippybear at 11:48 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


OTTERS ARE FOR HUGS NOT BITES



(but probably don't try to hug them either)
posted by seraphine at 11:52 PM on May 23, 2019 [7 favorites]


i mean- I fucking love sea otters- but considering their place in the food chain/web and how sharks are kinda threatened too this seems like an ecological win to me. A species has recovered enough to be prey again- even if the bites are more exploratory than anything else. Nature red in tooth and claw etc etc. We actually may have returned a species to a place in the web after we destroyed it. Go otters and go humans.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 11:57 PM on May 23, 2019 [17 favorites]


I just heard today about otters trying to mate with and killing baby seals so I'm going to have be on Team Shark for this one.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:06 AM on May 24, 2019


The worst thing about it is the terrible puns the sharks tell once they realize they've made a mistake.
posted by XMLicious at 2:28 AM on May 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


I had no idea sharks were such picky eaters.
posted by lordrunningclam at 5:18 AM on May 24, 2019 [2 favorites]


The ocean is a merciless void where everything eats everything else and if you choose to evolve to go back in it best of luck to you.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:26 AM on May 24, 2019 [5 favorites]


Metafilter: the bites are merely investigative.
posted by wildblueyonder at 7:00 AM on May 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


I heard a lecture by science writer Todd McLeish with lots of photos evoking many "awws" from the audience. His book is Return of the Otter which I purchased but gave as a gift before I had a chance to read it. The Monteray Herald article points out that they are a keystone species and McLeish explained that they control the species that graze on kelp so they help preserve the "forests" that provide habitat for many other species.
posted by Botanizer at 7:06 AM on May 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


i mean- I fucking love sea otters- but considering their place in the food chain/web and how sharks are kinda threatened too this seems like an ecological win to me. A species has recovered enough to be prey again- even if the bites are more exploratory than anything else. Nature red in tooth and claw etc etc

Yeah, I feel like the price you pay for increasing the population of an animal is that you're going to be more aware of their deaths. It doesn't sound like the occasional death due to curious shark is a significant threat to the health of the overall population, and, unless one or the other is recently invasive, this is presumably more or less how things happened for the millennia before humans started making big changes to shark and otter habitats.
posted by Copronymus at 9:25 AM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


The scientists in the article don't seem to regard it as too much of a problem either, but something that can be studied and taken into account for how it affects where you might want to release an otter from human custody
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:07 AM on May 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


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