Isabelle Groc - Sea Otters: A Survival Story
Here you can read online Isabelle Groc - Sea Otters: A Survival Story full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2020, publisher: Orca Book Publishers, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:Sea Otters: A Survival Story
- Author:
- Publisher:Orca Book Publishers
- Genre:
- Year:2020
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
Sea Otters: A Survival Story: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Sea Otters: A Survival Story" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Sea otters once ruled the Pacific Ocean, but the fur trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought this predator to near extinction.
Today theyre slowly coming back from the brink, and scientists are learning more about their pivotal role as one of natures keystone species. This book looks at the history, biology, behavior and uncertain future of sea otters. Author and photojournalist Isabelle Groc takes us into the field: watching sea otter rafts off the British Columbia coast from a kayak, exploring what makes their fur coats so special, understanding how their voracious appetites are helping kelp forests thrive and, ultimately, learning how sea otters are leaving their mark (or paws) on every part of the ecosystem. They might be one of the most adorable creatures in the ocean, but kids will discover how their survival is key to a rich, complex and connected ecosystem.
Isabelle Groc: author's other books
Who wrote Sea Otters: A Survival Story? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Sea Otters: A Survival Story — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Sea Otters: A Survival Story" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
S ea otters (Enhydra lutris) are the smallest marine mammal in North America and the second-largest member of the carnivorous family called Mustelidae. This means that sea otters relatives include weasels, wolverines and badgers. There are 13 otter species, including the North American river otter, the neotropical otter, the giant otter and the African clawless otter. People in North America often confuse river otters with sea otters. Yet river otters are quite different from sea otters. They are much smaller than sea otters, they are long and slender with pointed tails, and they never swim on their backs. River otters also come ashore to den, and they eat their prey on land.
Three subspecies of sea otters are recognized: the Russian or Asian sea otter (found in the waters off the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea, the Kuril Islands in the western North Pacific Ocean and the northernmost Japanese islands), the northern sea otter (found from Washington to Alaska) and the southern sea otter (found only in the waters off the California coast).
This northern sea otter off the British Columbia coast is grooming itself. Sea otters have good reason to take care of their coatsthey help them stay insulated in chilly waters.
Having escaped extinction and recovered in different parts of their historical range, sea otters have demonstrated how special they are. They may be one of the most adorable creatures in the world, but there is much more to sea otters than cute, furry faces, and they constantly surprise those who observe them.
Most marine mammals, including whales and seals, rely on a layer of fat called blubber to keep them warm. Sea otters dont. Instead of blubber, they have a dense, water-resistant fur coat to insulate them from the frigid waters of the northern Pacific.
Sea otters have the thickest fur of any animal in the worldas many as one million hairs per square inch. (We humans have about 100,000 hairs on our heads.) The fur has two layers, an undercoat and a layer of long, waterproof guard hairs. This traps warm air next to the sea otters skin. Sea otters spend a lot of time grooming and conditioning their fur to maintain that layer of insulating air. Even though sea otters live in water, their skin never gets wet.
A southern sea otter hauls out (comes ashore) on a sandy beach on the central coast of California.
While this special fur coat has protected sea otters against the cold for centuries, it also made them vulnerable to humans who wanted that fur for themselves. In 1741 an expedition led by explorer Vitus Bering came upon a sea-otter population in the Commander Islands off the eastern coast of Russia. The explorers went home with sea-otter pelts, and the luxurious sea-otter fur was soon in high demand throughout Russia, China, Japan and Europe.
A northern sea otter is resting on an iceberg in Alaska.
Peter Nile/GETTY IMAGES
For the next 160 years, ships and traders from North America, Russia, Britain and other countries hunted sea otters for their pelts, until the animals were almost wiped out. Nearly 15,000 sea otters per year were killed in the waters off Alaska at the turn of the 19th century.
The fur trade during the 18th and 19th centuries nearly drove sea otters to extinction by the early 1900s. B-03051 Royal BC Museum and Archives
Researchers dont know exactly how many sea otters existed prior to the fur trade but estimate between 100,000 and 300,000, with a range extending from the northern islands of Japan to Baja California, Mexico. Because sea otters were being hunted so intensely, Russia took measures to conserve the animals through a system of restrictions meant to sustain the population for continued hunting. Unfortunately, when Russia sold the territory of Alaska to the United States in 1867, those restrictions ended, and extreme hunting continued.
Sea-otter hunting was finally banned in 1911 by the International Fur Seal Treaty, but by then the sea otters were nearly gone. The Stellers sea cow, a marine mammal that the Bering expedition also encountered in 1741, had already been lost forever. An easily available source of meat, it had been hunted to extinction by 1768.
Sea otters often prefer shallow coastal waters.
Female sea otters usually spend their lives in one place and do not move much, but males venture out farther and explore larger areas.
Luckily, sea otters as a species managed to survive human greed. Living in secret coves and sheltered reefs on the rocky coast, 13 small remnant populations, totaling fewer than 2,000 animals, persisted in the North Pacific into the early 20th century. These tiny colonies were in isolated places, and they were almost all located near the northern limit of the sea-otter habitat, except for one single small colony on the coast of central California.
Since hunting was banned, sea otters are recolonizing their former habitats. In the 1960s people started becoming more aware of the need to conserve endangered species and repair the damage caused by humans. In the United States, sea otters received protection with the adoption of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Canada passed the Species at Risk Act in 2002.
Also in the 1960s, a number of sea-otter reintroduction programs were put in place to help sea-otter populations recover. Sea otters were reintroduced to British Columbia, southeast Alaska, Washington and Oregon. Today about 35 percent of the global sea-otter population can be attributed to those early translocations. The world population of sea otters is now estimated at about 125,000, living in locations along the coasts of central California, Washington, British Columbia, southeast Alaska, Prince William Sound, the Aleutian Islands and the Commander Islands.
In British Columbia the last sea otters were killed in 1929 and 1931 near the village of Kyuquot on Vancouver Island. Between 1969 and 1972, 89 sea otters were brought from Alaska to the west coast of Vancouver Island. An ecological reserve was created in 1981 to protect the sea-otter colony in Checleset Bay, where the animals were first reintroduced. Since then their numbers and range have expanded rapidly, and there are now nearly 7,000 of them along the west coast of Vancouver Island and the central coast of British Columbia.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «Sea Otters: A Survival Story»
Look at similar books to Sea Otters: A Survival Story. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book Sea Otters: A Survival Story and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.