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Speaker 4: All right, just a little up top, Hello, this is
Speaker 4: an encore of a very special episode to me, and
Speaker 4: I am under the summer weather with some sort of
Speaker 4: tiny little plague.
Speaker 1: But this is a great episode. Wow.
Speaker 4: Also stick around to the very very end of the
Speaker 4: episode for a new fresh secret about why this one
Speaker 4: means so much to me. Also, I slept thirteen hours
Speaker 4: last night and then took a nap tonight, so the
Speaker 4: hell I don't know?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 4: Onward, Oh hey, it's a lone air pod under the
Speaker 4: bench at a bus stop. Alleyward back with fresh horrors
Speaker 4: for you. Let's not get ahead of ourselves though, But
Speaker 4: straight up, if kids are listening with you, think about
Speaker 4: high tailing it right now to asmologies episode. Instead, they're
Speaker 4: in the main podcast feed. They're up at alleyward dot
Speaker 4: com slash ssmologies, which is linked in the show notes.
Speaker 4: Smologies are short and classroom safe. This one is not.
Speaker 1: It is not. Are we good?
Speaker 4: Good? Okay, let's get to otters. First off, thank you
Speaker 4: listener Isaiah Nubins, who suggested this guest and particular after
Speaker 4: hearing a review I read from a wis from the
Speaker 4: Urology episode and a wix dreamed that Neutrology was an
Speaker 4: episode and your dreams are coming true right now, all
Speaker 4: of our dreams. Also, thank you just to everyone for
Speaker 4: leaving and writing reviews.
Speaker 1: They matter so much. I read every single one.
Speaker 4: And this week we hit a really big lifelong goal
Speaker 4: of mine because of your reviews and subscribing and ologies,
Speaker 4: was the number one science podcast on Apple. It's been
Speaker 4: five years we hit number one. People, Let's do some
Speaker 4: air horns and a tiny imperceptible but dance good talk,
Speaker 4: huge giant goal. I can't believe it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thanks also to everyone on patroon dot com slash ologies
Speaker 4: for supporting the show. Each week though for reviews I
Speaker 4: pick a fresh one to prove that I see them all.
Speaker 4: And this week thank you to Shermworm who wrote come
Speaker 4: for the science facts, stay for the fields. And also
Speaker 4: thank you future ologist Mackenzie King, who described the show
Speaker 4: as a massage to my brain while drinking espresso. Okay,
Speaker 4: get into it. Trology it's a word. It's been cited
Speaker 4: in the literature one time, but that counts. JC von Voppelklein,
Speaker 4: a prominent scholar of crustaceans, coined it while describing a
Speaker 4: study about sea otters that was so well written it
Speaker 4: was an interesting read. Quote even for the non lutrinologist.
Speaker 4: So lutriside note comes from a mix of old old
Speaker 4: words for water, hence water water. And then the l
Speaker 4: they think was maybe picked up from lupis like a
Speaker 4: water wolf or ludo meaning to play. It's anyone's guess.
Speaker 4: But otters are in the same mustelide family as weasels
Speaker 4: and wolverines and minx and also badgers, and they are
Speaker 4: full of must and musk and mischief. And you're about
Speaker 4: to get absolutely destroyed by otter facts. Your small talk
Speaker 4: will never recover. Otters will be all you think about
Speaker 4: for the remainder of your life. Also with that, I
Speaker 4: have to issue a trigger and a content warning without
Speaker 4: spoiling too much. Otters are not not violent, and many
Speaker 4: of their behaviors would result in criminal charges if water
Speaker 4: weasels had a justice system. But in other ways they're
Speaker 4: better at relationships than we are now. This otter expert
Speaker 4: studied environmental systems for undergrad and got his PhD in
Speaker 4: ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and is
Speaker 4: now doing a postdoc at the University of Washington in
Speaker 4: connection with the American Museum of Natural History and the
Speaker 4: University of Texas. So buckle up, boy, howdie hot damn
Speaker 4: get ready for coastal versus Inland otters. Skull morphology that
Speaker 4: tricks our brains, teeth, fur beach pastries, rock pockets, the
Speaker 4: perils of selfless motherhood, kelp naps, the nostalgia of otter droppings,
Speaker 4: molar crunching, and of course otter handholding with scientists and
Speaker 4: certified otter expert lutrinologist, doctor Chris Law.
Speaker 5: My name is Chris Law and I go.
Speaker 1: By he him cool and doctor correct.
Speaker 5: Yes, doctor Law.
Speaker 4: Doctors, we had a suggestion for this ology a few
Speaker 4: weeks ago. Someone had a dream also that there was
Speaker 4: an otters episode, and they woke up and looked for it,
Speaker 4: and then they realized that they just drummed it up.
Speaker 4: And so that is why we hustled to find you,
Speaker 4: because someone had a need for an otter episode. So
Speaker 4: can you tell me how you came to be a
Speaker 4: weasel wizard?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I essentially started my guest science career with
Speaker 5: polycate worms during my undergrad at UC San Diego.
Speaker 4: These are bristly segmented marine worms which are almost as
Speaker 4: cute as otters. If you're into worms.
Speaker 5: And then as I was applying grad school, I met
Speaker 5: with my future Peachy advisor, Rita Meta at UC Santa
Speaker 5: Cruz and we're just chatting about potential research projects, and
Speaker 5: she studies more at EELS, So I was just assuming
Speaker 5: I was going to be working on some fish project,
Speaker 5: which is fine because that was my plan to go
Speaker 5: up the food chain. But then we were just chatting
Speaker 5: a little bit and she just brought up the idea,
Speaker 5: why don't you just work on sea otters because we're
Speaker 5: in Santa Cruz and they're just all over the place.
Speaker 5: And obviously I was like, ah, yeah, of course.
Speaker 4: So Chris has lived up and down the sunny Pacific
Speaker 4: coast in San Diego and Santa Cruz and Orange County
Speaker 4: and like nearly every California and he was familiar with
Speaker 4: the otters, so the suggestion to work on them was like, hell, yes,
Speaker 4: jack pot Jack Potter.
Speaker 5: I've seen them before, and like there are adorable little
Speaker 5: teddy bears that you just want to hug, and who
Speaker 5: doesn't want to work on them? So like the moment
Speaker 5: she said that, kind of just jumped on that bandwagon
Speaker 5: in and started doing some research into what potential projects
Speaker 5: I could could do. And since they eat all these
Speaker 5: hard shell preaetoms, one of the questions we really wanted
Speaker 5: to look at is just how are they actually breaking
Speaker 5: into those hard items. So kind of just got started
Speaker 5: on that. So basically in undergrad I come from like
Speaker 5: a phylogenetics background and evolutionary background. So I'm kind of
Speaker 5: halfway through working with sea otters or starting to look
Speaker 5: into sea otters. I just got this idea, I have
Speaker 5: to build a phylogenetic tree of all of the not
Speaker 5: only otters, but the weasels, Martins, wolverine, all those guys.
Speaker 5: So I just started building that phylogenic tree and then
Speaker 5: just learning a bunch of natural history by reading about
Speaker 5: this group, Like I have first dayn know that weasels
Speaker 5: were related to otters. So learned more about weasels and
Speaker 5: kind of went this down this rabbit hole to want
Speaker 5: to study why they so elongate?
Speaker 4: Yeah, they are like the docsins of the sea. Why
Speaker 4: are they so long and squiggly?
Speaker 5: The idea is that it came around fifteen or so
Speaker 5: million years ago. That's during the mid mass See Client transition,
Speaker 5: when temperatures drastically decrease, and this expansion of grasslands occurred,
Speaker 5: which then led to diversification of rodents. So then this
Speaker 5: body elongation is hypothesized to have allowed those weasel like
Speaker 5: creatures to go underground to chase all those rodents and
Speaker 5: these tight crevices and whatnot.
Speaker 4: Wow, I had no idea that that is why bodies
Speaker 4: were long. I mean, is that what doc sins are doing?
Speaker 4: Aren't they kind of like the rodent hol dwellers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that's the idea between or behind their kind
Speaker 5: of artificial selection right where people really are trying to
Speaker 5: breathe these elongate looking dogs so they can go in
Speaker 5: these tight crevices or burrows to try to get those rodents.
Speaker 5: And during hunting.
Speaker 4: Are they are they just chock full of vertebrae? Do
Speaker 4: they have more vertebrae or do they just have longer
Speaker 4: vertebrae than other animals.
Speaker 5: That is a fascinating question. So, like if you think
Speaker 5: of snakes or eels, they become more elongate by just
Speaker 5: simply adding more vertebrae, which makes sense right, But then
Speaker 5: with mammals we're actually constrained to the number of vertebrate
Speaker 5: that we have. So in carnivorans, which like dogs, bears, cats,
Speaker 5: they have about twenty thoracic lumbar vertebrate and that number
Speaker 5: rarely rarely changes, so it can't become elongate by just
Speaker 5: adding additional vertebrate. They have to actually evolve relatively longer vertebrae.
Speaker 4: I was always wondering that about like my short ish
Speaker 4: poodle dog versus a dosind or like a weasel, those long,
Speaker 4: almost wormy bodies just have longer backbones each individually.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, so they have the exact same number of vertebrae.
Speaker 5: It's just some of those breeds might have relatively longer ones,
Speaker 5: although no one, I don't think anybody has really looked
Speaker 5: into that. So it would be really interesting to see
Speaker 5: the skeletal elements of what actually contributes to those different
Speaker 5: body plans in these different breeds.
Speaker 4: So yes, every time you see a dog that you
Speaker 4: would like to pet, know that it has thirty main
Speaker 4: vertebrae and then between five to twenty three bonus tailbones.
Speaker 4: And corgheese side note, they're born with tails. Did you
Speaker 4: know that big bushy foxtails google It same with Australian
Speaker 4: shepherds and other herding dogs, but they tend to get
Speaker 4: the chop by breeders, because when they were actually used
Speaker 4: for hurting, no one wanted a stomped on tail. And
Speaker 4: I read one twenty eighteen study titled CE seven Vertebra
Speaker 4: Homoeotic transformation in domestic Dogs are pug dogs breaking mammalian
Speaker 4: evolutionary constraints which found that twenty five percent of pugs
Speaker 4: have one fewer vertebra than all other breeds. And I
Speaker 4: like to think that there's some be robed man in
Speaker 4: the sky and God took a vertebra from a snorting,
Speaker 4: farting pug dog.
Speaker 1: And made humans with it. Now, how many do you have?
Speaker 4: Well, you were probably born with thirty three, but you
Speaker 4: now have around twenty four. What happened, Dad?
Speaker 5: I think you wate Nope, they're.
Speaker 4: Just kind of fused together at the bottom, like a
Speaker 4: bag of raisinetes you left in a hot car, only
Speaker 4: it's your sacral spine and your cocsix. For more on this,
Speaker 4: see the Osteology episode. But enough about us, let's talk
Speaker 4: about gazing in wonder at Otters Now. Chris also happens
Speaker 4: to make really gorgeous science art charting the evolution of
Speaker 4: these mammals. In this beautiful colorful detail.
Speaker 1: And where in the tree of life are they?
Speaker 4: Because I feel like I think of an otter, and
Speaker 4: it seems like a cat, an aquatic cat, but also
Speaker 4: kind of like an upside down dog.
Speaker 1: What's happening?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So it's in the order Carnivora, and Carnivora is
Speaker 5: split into two different main grooves, the filiforms, which are
Speaker 5: like your cats, and then the other group are the caniforms,
Speaker 5: which are your dogs, bears, pinnipedes, and the mustelarges, which
Speaker 5: are the raccoons, weaselskunks, orders, all those guys. So basically
Speaker 5: in it caniforms, it goes dogs, bears, pinnipeds, then skunks,
Speaker 5: the red panda, raccoons, and then the Mastellis, which includes
Speaker 5: that really species rich group that includes the otters, the weasels,
Speaker 5: the wolverine, the martins, the honey badger, the European badger.
Speaker 5: There's like over sixty species in Mastellidae.
Speaker 4: Do you dream about this stuff, because I know you
Speaker 4: make art about phylogenetic trees. Does your brain is it
Speaker 4: always trying to kind of construct visuals of this?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean that's why I love like learning how
Speaker 5: to make phylogenetic trees. I think it's just such a
Speaker 5: cool way to just like showcase the evolutionary history of
Speaker 5: like physically the tree of life and with the carnivorence
Speaker 5: in general, Like, it's such a diverse group and like
Speaker 5: so many different types of body plans and different sizes
Speaker 5: and shape. So it's really cool to be able to
Speaker 5: visualize all that and like how this one species came
Speaker 5: from this group of species, or how these two closely
Speaker 5: really species are from the same part of tree but
Speaker 5: then look so very different. So yeah, that's part of
Speaker 5: the fun parts of being in the evolutionary.
Speaker 1: Are you an organized person in general?
Speaker 5: I pretend to be. It comes and goes.
Speaker 4: Now, question what is it like to be an autologist?
Speaker 4: Do you get to touch them? Do you get to
Speaker 4: hold them? Do you get to pet their fur? Do
Speaker 4: you get to touch a pelt? Do you get to
Speaker 4: hold their hand? Do they give you clams? What is
Speaker 4: your life like?
Speaker 5: Oh? I mean I wish I could do all of that.
Speaker 5: The closest I've done is touched one. It is honestly
Speaker 5: the softest thing, at least the sea hotter. It's the
Speaker 5: softest thing I've ever felt. I totally understood or understand
Speaker 5: why people back in the day really wanted to hunt
Speaker 5: them just because that pelt like you just want to
Speaker 5: rub your face on them because it's just so soft,
Speaker 5: and I'm sure it's also pretty warm in terms of
Speaker 5: doing all the other stuff in terms of like wanting
Speaker 5: to hold their hands. I don't think I would ever
Speaker 5: want to do that with the wild oatter because they
Speaker 5: will try to eat your face or like bite your
Speaker 5: face if they could. They're pure evil.
Speaker 4: They are pure evil, says doctor Chris Law, a professional lucronologist.
Speaker 4: You knew this was coming, didn't you. Okay, I'm glad
Speaker 4: we jumped right into that because I feel like somehow
Speaker 4: I became informed a few years ago that otters the
Speaker 4: cutest things ever also absolute bastards, evil sexual predators. They
Speaker 4: will steal your stuff and sell it at a pawn
Speaker 4: shop like they're the worst.
Speaker 1: Give us a dark side? How fucked up our otters?
Speaker 5: Oh? I mean yeah, so basically everything you said it
Speaker 5: is true. Probably the worst thing is that they can
Speaker 5: also be dog killers. So apparently there are a couple
Speaker 5: incidents where somebody's dog was just like barking at one
Speaker 5: of the one of these otters, along like the dock
Speaker 5: or something, and I guess that order just got fed up,
Speaker 5: went up to it and just apparently dragged it down,
Speaker 5: and I believe it might have drowned it. But again,
Speaker 5: this is just through word of mouth, so who knows.
Speaker 4: Okay, it's September twenty twenty one. Hurricane Ida is ruining live.
Speaker 4: The pandemic rages on via the Delta variant and Squid
Speaker 4: Game premieres. Yes, folks, that was less than a here
Speaker 4: I go. But meanwhile, in Alaska, otters are terrorizing Anchorage citizens,
Speaker 4: literally chasing and sinking teeth into a nine year old boy,
Speaker 4: and this is not the first time. According to one
Speaker 4: news source quote, officials are currently investigating whether the incidents
Speaker 4: all involve the same group of otters. And it's not
Speaker 4: just in the Last Frontier, it's also in the Sunshine State.
Speaker 5: Cell phone video of a charging otter.
Speaker 4: This is a picture of the alleged otter sent to
Speaker 4: us by Greg Butler.
Speaker 5: Butler says the otter attacked his.
Speaker 1: Dog, Chester. Chester was bitten on the nose after an
Speaker 1: otter charged through his screened in porch. Two of his
Speaker 1: human neighbors were bitten on their heels and hands.
Speaker 5: This otter comes flying out of the lake, just starts
Speaker 5: to chase my bike, actually just right after my bike.
Speaker 4: So while rare, these incidents are not isolated, and in
Speaker 4: communities all over the globe, fearful locals demand of officials
Speaker 4: you water, get that outer out of her.
Speaker 5: I've heard this a couple of times, and this has
Speaker 5: happened a couple of times. So it's kind of gnarly.
Speaker 1: I mean, how big are they?
Speaker 4: Because I feel like river otters are bigger, right, how
Speaker 4: big is sea otter like?
Speaker 1: And also what's the difference between a river otter and
Speaker 1: a sea otter?
Speaker 5: Oh? So actually a sea otter is much bigger than
Speaker 5: a North American river otter. But in California then they
Speaker 5: don't get that big. Those are more Alaskan otters, but
Speaker 5: they are still much bigger than a little river otter.
Speaker 4: And just to back up a little bit, there are
Speaker 4: thirteen species of otter globally. The US has two species,
Speaker 4: the little river otter, about the same weight as a pug,
Speaker 4: and then the sea otters, which off California can be
Speaker 4: up to ninety pounds like a rottweiler, although the beefy
Speaker 4: or Alaskan variety can top one hundred libbys, think like
Speaker 4: a Bernese mountain dof floating around gnawing on a crap.
Speaker 4: Now they're also Eurasian otters about twenty pounds docks and size,
Speaker 4: and some medium size African otters, South American giant river otters,
Speaker 4: which are somewhere between an American river otter and a
Speaker 4: sea otter in size, and then there's the teeny chihuahua
Speaker 4: sized Asian otters. But yes, in the US, I was
Speaker 4: surprised that the river otters were smaller and that the
Speaker 4: sea otters were these hefty clam eating sea beasts. They're
Speaker 4: big and they're not cuddly.
Speaker 5: Definitely can be pretty vicious if you get too close
Speaker 5: to them.
Speaker 4: How did some evolve to hang out in freshwater and
Speaker 4: others seawater or does it even matter because it's their
Speaker 4: breathing air.
Speaker 1: Right, I'm amazed. We don't want have fins and gills.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, actually all other otters are primarily freshwater. So
Speaker 5: it's the sea otter that's unique. It's that odd ball
Speaker 5: that evolved from all the other otters like about eight
Speaker 5: to ten million years ago, and it went on basically
Speaker 5: its own heavily sh your trajectory, so everything it does,
Speaker 5: everything about their physiology is very different compared to other
Speaker 5: river otters and sea otters are primarily just found in
Speaker 5: the ocean, whereas river otters, especially like North American river
Speaker 5: otters and Eurasian otters, will actually go into the marine
Speaker 5: environment as well, so you can find you can be
Speaker 5: in locations like in Washington where there will be both
Speaker 5: river otters and sea otters.
Speaker 1: Oh, where are they sleeping? Do they go home at night?
Speaker 4: Sea otters either one like, do they sleep in the
Speaker 4: water or do they have like a cave that they
Speaker 4: hang out in on shore?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So so river otters have dens that they hang out.
Speaker 5: I've never actually seen one, but yeah, I'm presumably along
Speaker 5: the shore. But then sea otters actually just float in
Speaker 5: the water, and I'm sure you've heard stories of where
Speaker 5: they can. They'll wrap themselves in some kelp so they
Speaker 5: don't float away and they can take a nap that way.
Speaker 5: They're relatively small marine mammals. They burn a lot of heat,
Speaker 5: so they have to sleep a lot to refuel and
Speaker 5: you always see them like just taking this news to
Speaker 5: conserve some energy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, do you think they hold hands in the wild
Speaker 4: or is that just a publicity video firm a zoo.
Speaker 5: So I don't I actually don't know because I had
Speaker 5: I remember giving a presentation at this I think conference
Speaker 5: and I had an image of that, you know, that
Speaker 5: image of two crs holding hands that was taken at
Speaker 5: one of the aquariums, and somebody gave me shit for
Speaker 5: it without correctly doing that because she said that they
Speaker 5: don't hold hands in the wild. But then apparently a
Speaker 5: couple weeks or months later, there's like some photos of
Speaker 5: wild hotters holding hands. So I don't know.
Speaker 4: So they have a good PR team. They're like, listen,
Speaker 4: TMZ's around the corner. We're going to have to do something.
Speaker 4: Also shout out to otter paparazzi Drew Wharton, the founder
Speaker 4: of ceotters dot com, who in twenty sixteen captured the
Speaker 4: first photo of otters doing.
Speaker 1: This in the wild, like.
Speaker 4: A celebrity couple holding hands walking into nobood to eat
Speaker 4: a bunch of Rossya food. Also, ceotters dot com has
Speaker 4: a live sea otter camps if you would like to
Speaker 4: stare at them with like minded people over the internet.
Speaker 4: What is the autology community like, are people really focused
Speaker 4: on conservation? Are they trying to figure out how to
Speaker 4: increase populations? Like is there a big conservation effort around
Speaker 4: these guys?
Speaker 5: Oh? Yeah, there's a huge effort out all the major aquariums,
Speaker 5: so like the Money Bay Aquarium in California, the Seattle
Speaker 5: Aquarium in Washington. I'm sure up in BC and Alaska
Speaker 5: also has great effort, But the one I'm most familiar
Speaker 5: with are the ones down in Central Coast California where
Speaker 5: the Minority Bear Quarium U see Standa Cruz, the US
Speaker 5: Geological Survey, Fish and Wildlife. Basically all of these organizations
Speaker 5: they do all of this great outreach work and also
Speaker 5: a lot of work with the wild populations to make
Speaker 5: sure that the population is doing well, that individuals are healthy,
Speaker 5: and that you know, all the possible things that could
Speaker 5: affect them are looked into.
Speaker 4: How is their population like the sea otters, for example,
Speaker 4: I feel like people are really rallying for the sea otters,
Speaker 4: like how is their population, Like.
Speaker 1: Is it rebounding at all?
Speaker 4: Because we just did an episode on urchins and they
Speaker 4: were like, urchins are everywhere because sea otters are not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, uh so, I guess it's very different depending on
Speaker 5: what population of sea otters you're talking about, so that
Speaker 5: helped to urchin. The sea otter system is really describing
Speaker 5: the Alaskan populations pretty well, so that classic killer will
Speaker 5: is eating the sea otters, which then increases urchins, which
Speaker 5: then decreases helpforce. But then in California the system's a
Speaker 5: little bit different, where the sea otter population is actually
Speaker 5: doing relatively stable. So I think there's about maybe three
Speaker 5: thousand individuals in coast of California. I could be wrong
Speaker 5: on that. I have to check my numbers. He's right,
Speaker 5: but basically the idea is that they are kind of
Speaker 5: constrained between a point conception down south and half Moon
Speaker 5: Bay up north. And the reason why they can't expand
Speaker 5: because they're being attacked by sharks up north, and I
Speaker 5: guess fishermen are pushing them back up from the south,
Speaker 5: so they can't really expand, and that why there's they're
Speaker 5: more like this carrying capacity where they're running out of
Speaker 5: food and that auter population can't really increase because of that.
Speaker 4: So in California they're stuck between a net and a
Speaker 4: shark place. And sea otters have been protected since the
Speaker 4: nineteen eleven International fur Seal treaty after colonization of North
Speaker 4: America led to a dangerous decline. And I looked into
Speaker 4: it and yep, there's about three thousand sea otters off
Speaker 4: the coast to the Pacific in California, and then ninety
Speaker 4: percent of the world sea otters are off the coast
Speaker 4: of Alaska. There's about twenty five thousand of them there. Now,
Speaker 4: what about the river otters. It's estimated about one hundred
Speaker 4: thousand of North American river otters exist in the US
Speaker 4: and Canada. According to the banger of a paper river
Speaker 4: otter Status, management and distribution in the United States evidence
Speaker 4: of large scale population increase and range expansion. So that's good.
Speaker 4: And of the world's thirteen species, eight are threatened, including
Speaker 4: the Asian small clawed otter and the smooth coated otter,
Speaker 4: and one called the hairy nosed otter, which sounds cute
Speaker 4: but it might be ferocious. All of these otters are like,
Speaker 4: we got to make more otters. Also, I'm gonna warn
Speaker 4: you right now this next part contains scenarios and language
Speaker 4: that might be literally triggering to victims of violence. Fucking otters,
Speaker 4: dude otters, fucking dude sex, lives of otters. What's going on?
Speaker 4: How are they making more otters? Is it a horror show?
Speaker 5: It basically is very It's basically just yeah.
Speaker 1: That's what I heard. That's what I heard. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not great people.
Speaker 4: And I'm bleeping out a word that starts with R
Speaker 4: that means sexual self. I know it can be hard
Speaker 4: for survivors to hear, so I'm just airing on the
Speaker 4: side of bleeping otters.
Speaker 5: So, so, females have it rough because basically the moment
Speaker 5: they become sexually mature, they are either pregnant or have
Speaker 5: a baby with them or a pup with them, until
Speaker 5: they literally exhaust to themselves to death. And it's called
Speaker 5: end lactation syndrome for the females where they just basically
Speaker 5: just die because they're just so exhausted from, you know,
Speaker 5: putting so much energy towards their pups or towards milk production,
Speaker 5: and they also have to afford for their puffs. And
Speaker 5: I'll say one thing, some of those pups are basically
Speaker 5: just like little parasites. I remember just watching a mom
Speaker 5: and a pup interact, and this pup is almost bigger
Speaker 5: than the mom, and it was still hanging out with mom,
Speaker 5: and the moment mom goes diving, the pup just like
Speaker 5: hangs out on the surface being all cute and happy.
Speaker 5: But then when the mom comes up with food, it
Speaker 5: just immediately swims to the mom and just starts like,
Speaker 5: you know, crying and begging for food. And again this
Speaker 5: pup is almost bigger than a mom. Basically, pups usually
Speaker 5: stay with the mom for six months to up to
Speaker 5: a year, and it's those usually those slackers that are
Speaker 5: staying up for a year are usually just as big
Speaker 5: as a mom, still continually getting food from it.
Speaker 4: How did evolution allow for that? How can how can
Speaker 4: they sustain that? These poor ladies? And what are all
Speaker 4: the bachelors doing? Are they roving in packs of otters?
Speaker 4: Are there like packs of bachelor river otters just terrorizing?
Speaker 5: Uh so, so yeah, the evolution question, I think it's
Speaker 5: just because that pup will be like nice and fat
Speaker 5: and ready to kind of go hunt on its own,
Speaker 5: because if it gets weaned too early or at leaves
Speaker 5: mom too early, it's not going to be able to
Speaker 5: eat or get enough food and it's just going to die.
Speaker 5: And in that case, you're just going to lose your
Speaker 5: you know, offspring and your genetic potential. Right, if that
Speaker 5: happens so evolutionarily, you know, there might be that reason
Speaker 5: for why why that pup really wants to extract all
Speaker 5: the nutrients from the mom before it can go off
Speaker 5: on its own and do its thing. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 5: I live with my mom. Oh yeah, you hungry, grayma,
Speaker 5: we get some. Yeah. And in terms of the males,
Speaker 5: oh yeah, those guys don't do anything once. Basically, the
Speaker 5: males are constantly circling females because once that pup leaves,
Speaker 5: it's gonna go, you know, reproduced to pass off its genes.
Speaker 5: And then once that happens, I mean, it's a it's
Speaker 5: a terrifying show that I mean, I'm happy to describe it, but.
Speaker 4: You know, give us the dirt one thousand content and
Speaker 4: trigger warnings.
Speaker 5: So normally, once once that female is free, the male
Speaker 5: would get on it and then essentially where the male
Speaker 5: will bite onto the female's nose. So often you'll see
Speaker 5: females with ripped noses and you can easily tell that
Speaker 5: the female just because it's biting down on that note
Speaker 5: and basically forcing itself on it to you know, facets
Speaker 5: facet jeans.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, So.
Speaker 5: Once that happens, the male just leaves and you'll probably
Speaker 5: never see the female ever again.
Speaker 4: Oh, I like want to file for restraining orders on
Speaker 4: behalf of female otters, Like this is not okay, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's not okay.
Speaker 1: Do they have any defenses?
Speaker 4: Like do they have thicker fur or do they have
Speaker 4: like an extra claw anywhere or like mace?
Speaker 5: No, I don't think so. And yeah, and also the
Speaker 5: females are much smaller than the male, so they're kind
Speaker 5: of defenseless in that regard.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I want them to evolve a pepper sprayland.
Speaker 4: That's horrible, horrible. I want them to go on strike
Speaker 4: and live in their own happy island. Me, like, get
Speaker 4: your own urchins.
Speaker 5: I know, if only they could otherwise. Yeah, like I said,
Speaker 5: basically that's the female and they do this for maybe
Speaker 5: like twelve fifteen years at the most in the wild,
Speaker 5: where basically they just get pregnant a couple times or
Speaker 5: like a lot of times during their lifetime and just
Speaker 5: reproduce and have pups and cycle just continues over and
Speaker 5: over against until they die from exhaustion. It's pretty nuts.
Speaker 1: Oh what about in captivity?
Speaker 4: We have no right obviously to enforce any of our
Speaker 4: like assumed ethics sexual ethics on otters. But in captivity,
Speaker 4: are they like, hey, dude, not at all or do
Speaker 4: they just have to let nature be terrible?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 5: So, usually in captivity, all the odds that you might
Speaker 5: see in aquariums are all females because a lot of
Speaker 5: these bigger aquariums they actually use them as surrogates for
Speaker 5: wild otters that might be orphaned. So like, if the
Speaker 5: moment wild dies, there's usually this pop that's worn alone,
Speaker 5: and since they're threaatened, at least in California, there's been
Speaker 5: a program to basically take these otters in, especially their
Speaker 5: female still have the surrogates raise them until they can
Speaker 5: re release them in a wild when they're old enough.
Speaker 1: Do they do that in the wild?
Speaker 4: Do they like penguins, do they adopt orphaned otters in
Speaker 4: the wild or is that kind of unique to captivity.
Speaker 5: That's usually unique to captivity. I don't think I've ever
Speaker 5: heard in any situation where a wild female would take
Speaker 5: in another stray pup. And usually if the stray pup
Speaker 5: is alone, it's not going to even survive for that
Speaker 5: long because it's basically defenseless and helpless can't even go
Speaker 5: catch its own food by itself, so it'll just die.
Speaker 5: So so yeah, that's why, you know, like the Honorary
Speaker 5: Barry Quereum really relies on stranding networks or like volunteers
Speaker 5: or people just you know, observing or seeing a wild
Speaker 5: otter by it, like a little pup, somebody will call
Speaker 5: it in and they'll send out a team to bring
Speaker 5: it in if they can't look at their mom or
Speaker 5: something like that.
Speaker 1: And I mean, they're so cute. But now I'm like
Speaker 1: a little mad at the pups too.
Speaker 4: But why are they so cu from a morphological as
Speaker 4: someone who studied their bone structure and how long noodle
Speaker 4: they are? How and why are they so cute?
Speaker 5: That's a great question. I don't know why they are
Speaker 5: so cute, but how it's because their skulls are very
Speaker 5: flat faces. So if you look at a basically a
Speaker 5: newborn curs skull, it doesn't have that snout pronounced snout yet,
Speaker 5: so it's very like a puppy dog face or like
Speaker 5: even like a newborn baby's face, and which I guess
Speaker 5: in our brains it's hardwired to you know, want to
Speaker 5: like take it and hold it and protect it and
Speaker 5: all that.
Speaker 4: This side note is called baby schema, and it's when
Speaker 4: a juvenile organism has a large head and a round
Speaker 4: face and big eyes and smaller other features like ears
Speaker 4: and snout and mouth and fun fact, Mickey Mouse has
Speaker 4: aged in reverse, his features have grown more, maybe like
Speaker 4: with each decade. And when adults retain some cute characteristics,
Speaker 4: our brains get confus used and say, protect them at
Speaker 4: all costs, even if they are ghoules like your tiny
Speaker 4: racist grandma.
Speaker 1: Or a sea otter.
Speaker 5: But in terms of why they might be like that
Speaker 5: in the wild, I have no idea, Like what kind
Speaker 5: of selective advantage that is. Maybe other other animals think
Speaker 5: it's cute, or maybe they're mom or in other otter
Speaker 5: in the individuals might might have some kind of selective
Speaker 5: pressure on it. But I have no idea.
Speaker 4: I'm going to go back to school. I'm going to
Speaker 4: get a PhD in otters. They're so cute because their
Speaker 4: babies are such assholes that you would literally not feed
Speaker 4: them if they weren't so cute. Ugh, Can I ask
Speaker 4: you some questions from listeners who know that you're coming
Speaker 4: on the show. Yeah, okay, we're just gonna lightning around.
Speaker 4: We're going to see how many we can get through.
Speaker 1: Is that cool?
Speaker 5: Yep? Sounds great.
Speaker 4: But before we crack into your questions, we're going to
Speaker 4: toss some coins into an ocean of need. And Chris
Speaker 4: chose sea otter Savvy, which increases awareness of protecting sea
Speaker 4: otters and courage is responsible viewing guidelines and for more
Speaker 4: about what they do and check out volunteer opportunities see
Speaker 4: settersavvy dot org. And savvy has two v's and not
Speaker 4: two a's and I always mess it up, but yes,
Speaker 4: a donation went to see ottersavvy dot org thanks to
Speaker 4: sponsor get value.
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Speaker 4: Okay, your questions, the first being from an actual patron
Speaker 4: of the show. Okay, first question from a very important
Speaker 4: listener named Larry Ward, also known as a grand pod
Speaker 4: around here.
Speaker 1: It's my dad. He wanted to know.
Speaker 4: They eat kilt or living.
Speaker 5: That's a good question.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Do they eat kelp or do they
Speaker 1: just live in the kelp?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so otters don't eat the kelp. They just live
Speaker 5: in it. So they'll use it and wrap it, wrap
Speaker 5: themselves in it to you know, stay in one place
Speaker 5: if they're sleeping. But they really rely on it indirectly
Speaker 5: just because it's such an important ecosystem in Calfornia where
Speaker 5: all they're basically invertebrate prey that they're eating live off it,
Speaker 5: or live under it, or live on it. So is
Speaker 5: it really essential to them indirectly?
Speaker 4: A ha, So it's like their apartment and the grocery
Speaker 4: store all at once, exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and yeah, they rarely leave it just because it's
Speaker 5: a nice protected area, so it's harder for predators to
Speaker 5: find them. Nice.
Speaker 1: Are they meat eaters? Only?
Speaker 4: They are carnivores, right? They typically just exist on just
Speaker 4: sushi buffet yep.
Speaker 5: They essentially eat your favorite types of seafood. So you
Speaker 5: got your snails, your clams, your muscles, your avalony, your
Speaker 5: crabs and urchins. They also eat these kind of gross
Speaker 5: looking things called fat innkeeper worms. I don't know if
Speaker 5: you ever see pick yes, I have.
Speaker 1: They look like dicks. They look like disembodied, horrible fluby dildos. Listen, okay, listen.
Speaker 4: These worms are also called penis fish, and I'm a
Speaker 4: fan of a phallus, trust me on that. But you
Speaker 4: have to imagine them just poking up like whack a
Speaker 4: moles in the mud, just like slop slop slop going
Speaker 4: and when it's time to go potty. Fat innkeeper worms
Speaker 4: squirt a steady liquid stream out of one end, and
Speaker 4: sometimes beaches are littered with these flaccid worms. They're beached
Speaker 4: by the thousands, like the most surreal dumb truck accident
Speaker 4: you've ever seen. But they're also a delicacy and they're
Speaker 4: considered an aphrodisiac, And like most things, it's really just
Speaker 4: set and setting.
Speaker 1: They're not as.
Speaker 4: Picturesque as maybe you would want them to be. But yeah,
Speaker 4: so fat innkeeper worms is what they're called.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so they'll eat those as well, But most of
Speaker 5: their prey are usually hard shell pray because they contain
Speaker 5: more calories.
Speaker 4: A ha, okay, that brings us to a question that
Speaker 4: everybody asked. Jamie McNeil Jaco's first time question asker, Francesca Huggins,
Speaker 4: Lenny Ozolith, Jesse Herlbort, Alicia Henning, Emma Sherwood.
Speaker 1: Mariah McGregor.
Speaker 4: Everyone wanted to know, in Jaco's words, is there commonality
Speaker 4: between otter's favorite rocks? Like? Do most otters use one
Speaker 4: particular kind of rock? Do they have a favorite rock?
Speaker 4: Jamie mcdeal wants to know, how do they pick a
Speaker 4: lot of people need to know what's up with their rocks?
Speaker 5: So that is a myth. They do not have a
Speaker 5: favorite rock.
Speaker 1: What no flam flam busted? What? Wow?
Speaker 5: Okay, so often these rocks are pretty big and they
Speaker 5: do have like a little I guess you could call
Speaker 5: it a pocket, but it's just a flap of skin
Speaker 5: that they can keep praying. But these rocks are usually
Speaker 5: too big to do that. So normally what they do
Speaker 5: is that they come up with the rock and they're preyed.
Speaker 5: They put the rock on their belly, use it as
Speaker 5: an anvil and break things, eat the things, and they
Speaker 5: keep doing that and basically when they're done with the rock,
Speaker 5: they just do a little turn, the rock falls down,
Speaker 5: and then they go on with their lives.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 5: So they don't they don't really have that favorite rock.
Speaker 5: I mean, they might reuse the rock if it's the
Speaker 5: only rock that's available, because they are just right there
Speaker 5: and just decide to go back down to get more
Speaker 5: food and that rock happens to be here, so they
Speaker 5: might pick it up again to use it, but they're
Speaker 5: definitely not traveling around with it.
Speaker 4: It's hilarious. I completely thought like they had a fanny
Speaker 4: pack and they're.
Speaker 1: Like, where's my good rock? Not this rock?
Speaker 4: What about you know, from like a philosophical perspective, is
Speaker 4: that tool use or is it only a tool if
Speaker 4: you use the rock to smash the clams and not
Speaker 4: the clams to smash on the rock, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean no, we call it. We still call
Speaker 5: it as a tool use because it is still you know,
Speaker 5: you're still putting an object onto your you know, stomach
Speaker 5: and then actually using it as a tool essentially to
Speaker 5: break something open. And I'll say that otters can also
Speaker 5: use other objects as tools. So sometimes they'll use another
Speaker 5: shell to break open in their shell, they'll use like bottles.
Speaker 5: They'll even use like docks in people's boats, which like
Speaker 5: to break things open. So they will use anything.
Speaker 1: Now from using tools to being tools.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, Daniel Manuel wants to know about their As
Speaker 4: long as we're just we're going to go back to
Speaker 4: them being terrible. Are the observations of sea otters assaulting
Speaker 4: sexually and killing baby seals? Are those common or is
Speaker 4: that exaggerated?
Speaker 5: I don't know how common it is, but it definitely
Speaker 5: is to a point where there's multiple observations of them
Speaker 5: doing that. So the way male's territories work is that
Speaker 5: the dominant males have territories that you know, exclude other
Speaker 5: males from their territories, right, And in that kind of competition,
Speaker 5: there's always going to be losers and they're excluded from
Speaker 5: these territories. So if they can't have their own territory
Speaker 5: to mate with females, they just get I guess, frustrated
Speaker 5: and find that little baby seal to do it's you know,
Speaker 5: to basically bit I guess, and that's usually doesn't end
Speaker 5: well with the seal.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it doesn't end well even for the otters. And
Speaker 4: according to a healthscape of a study titled Pattern of
Speaker 4: Mortality in Southern sea Otters, about eleven percent of dearly
Speaker 4: departed sea otters spotted by researchers died by mating trauma
Speaker 4: eleven percent. And the violence is not just male to
Speaker 4: female within same species. Boy bottles sea otters can also
Speaker 4: hit below the proverbial anthropomorphized beltline.
Speaker 5: One thing that's crazy about these male to male conflicts
Speaker 5: is that when they fight each other, they essentially go
Speaker 5: after each other's vaculums, which in carnivorans, there's a Carnivorans
Speaker 5: have a bone called vaculum in their penis, so they
Speaker 5: go after each each other's vaculum to try to break it. Oh,
Speaker 5: it's pretty brutal out there.
Speaker 4: How did they learn how to be such assholes? Are
Speaker 4: most like North American mammals? Are most animals this ferocious
Speaker 4: And we're just surprised because they're pretty adorable.
Speaker 5: Honestly, I have no idea how that compares to other
Speaker 5: mammals groups. One of the nice things about sea otters
Speaker 5: is that they have to come to the surface and
Speaker 5: they just float, so it's just so easy to get
Speaker 5: these observations because they're also really close to shore, so
Speaker 5: like we are aware to get these detailed information, whereas
Speaker 5: like other smaller animals, like even river otters, it's really
Speaker 5: hard to spot them and actually see what they're doing
Speaker 5: in the wild. In the wild, so who knows what
Speaker 5: they're doing out there?
Speaker 3: Weird lucky stuff.
Speaker 4: You know what's funny is I just looked at Emma
Speaker 4: Sherwood asked, I learned on a high school field trip
Speaker 4: to the zoo that mail orders break each other's dicks
Speaker 4: to reduce competition.
Speaker 1: Is this true?
Speaker 4: Oh, there you go, Emma Sherwood knows what's up. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Kathleen Sachs wants to know, can a troop of dedicated
Speaker 4: river otters really kill an alligator or a crocodile?
Speaker 1: Is that flim flam?
Speaker 5: So there's these things called giant river otters in South
Speaker 5: America and the Amazon, and these things are a little
Speaker 5: bit longer than the sea otters. And if you ever
Speaker 5: see pictures of these ones, they are so weird looking.
Speaker 5: And they they are another older lineage of otters that
Speaker 5: kind of offshoot from other otters, like ten million years
Speaker 5: ago or so. But they got really like buggy eyes,
Speaker 5: and they got their their faces just like at like
Speaker 5: like an alien otter. But these guys are huge, and
Speaker 5: they actually are in family units and they will actually
Speaker 5: go after sometimes go after like Cayman's And there are
Speaker 5: even reports of them like fighting off jaguars no, which
Speaker 5: is pretty and crazy.
Speaker 4: For more on this, join the four point two million
Speaker 4: other humans who have watched a YouTube video titled Giant
Speaker 4: Otter bite Jaguar Head seriously injured for daring to attack
Speaker 4: its comrades, uploaded by user Wildlife Today, and this and
Speaker 4: the other like fourteen videos I subsequently watched taught me
Speaker 4: that a brawl with giant river otters sounds a lot
Speaker 4: like the worst game of Marco Polo. Why well, according
Speaker 4: to the paper Airborne Vocal Communication in adult neotropical otters,
Speaker 4: these creatures have like a menu of sounds they make
Speaker 4: to chit chat, from a ha it's like their own
Speaker 4: personal siren, to infant babbling, and something called a hum
Speaker 4: gradation that means yo, bear left, go left. We're going
Speaker 4: left to direct the group. And yes, some otters have
Speaker 4: more friends than us, but let's try to forget that fact.
Speaker 5: I mean, well, yeah, the advantage for those guys is
Speaker 5: that they are in a group setting, so they have
Speaker 5: kind of each other's back to try to, you know,
Speaker 5: fight off predators that might try to attack their young Dang.
Speaker 1: I do not want to be on the wrong side
Speaker 1: of an otter vendetta.
Speaker 4: Ever, I will have my vengeance, you know what. Let's
Speaker 4: try to steer this towards the positives again. Okay, life
Speaker 4: is such a bummer. It's such a bummer, but it's imperative.
Speaker 4: We find the good and we grasp it and we
Speaker 4: clutch at it like a booie and the cold roiling sea,
Speaker 4: and we hug the booy hug the good. What about playfulness?
Speaker 4: And cuteness. Anna Thompson, Maury Pelte, Nicole Kleinman, Michelle Tang,
Speaker 4: Becky the Sassy Seagrass, scientist Pierce Franklin. They all want
Speaker 4: to know how cute does it get? Pierce wants to know,
Speaker 4: what's the cutest thing you've ever seen an otter do.
Speaker 5: The cutest thing I've ever seen is probably just like
Speaker 5: a little baby sea otter pup that's just floating by
Speaker 5: itself waiting for its mom. I mean, I know I
Speaker 5: told you about how just waiting for mom to bring
Speaker 5: up dinner essentially, but before that, it's just floating by
Speaker 5: itself like a little cork, closed eyes all fluffy and like,
Speaker 5: just look at me. I'm so adorable. Like it's got
Speaker 5: like ten photographers just around, like along the coast or
Speaker 5: coast trying to take up its picture, including me, Like
Speaker 5: it's adorable. Probably the most playful time I've seen otters
Speaker 5: actually river otters. They actually play so like they will
Speaker 5: swim next to each other or like go up and
Speaker 5: down or just run all over the place. So I've
Speaker 5: seen that in river otters, but I've never really seen
Speaker 5: that sea otters.
Speaker 4: Ronan Taylor An and Kate Tim's all want to know
Speaker 4: why do they love ice so much? In Kate's words,
Speaker 4: and Rona want snow? Do they get cold? Roda says,
Speaker 4: we have otters in our local river in Scotland and
Speaker 4: it's magical when you see them.
Speaker 1: But oh boy, it gets so chilly. How do they
Speaker 1: stay cold in an icy river?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So sea otters have the densest fur I think
Speaker 5: of all mammals, So basically sea otters have no fat
Speaker 5: on them whatsoever, so they're really relying on that dense
Speaker 5: fur and it does keep them warm, super warm. So
Speaker 5: that's why they're able to tolerate living in all these freezing,
Speaker 5: frigid environments just fine. And I would imagine river otters
Speaker 5: also have similarly dense fur, so that's why they're able
Speaker 5: to live in like Scotland and all these other cold
Speaker 5: places and play in the snow.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: Sea otters, unlike most marine mammals, do not have layers
Speaker 4: of blubber. This is news to me, and this is
Speaker 4: also why their fur is so soft, up to illustrous
Speaker 4: one hundred and sixty five thousand hairs per square centimeter.
Speaker 4: Eurasian river otters about seventy thousand hairs per square centimeter.
Speaker 4: What about us, a species that has fewer friends than otters, Well,
Speaker 4: we only have one hundred and twenty four to two
Speaker 4: hundred hairs per square centimeter. Talking about the business end
Speaker 4: of one, Francesca Huggins, Miranda Panda, Claire Johnson, and Specsowl
Speaker 4: all would love to talk about their poop, and several
Speaker 4: people wanted to know what they smell like. Francesca asked,
Speaker 4: I heard that otter poop smells like violets. What in
Speaker 4: the otter shit? Is this true?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 4: Clara says that they went to the zoo and the
Speaker 4: guide said that otter poop is noteworthy, but then said
Speaker 4: nothing else, So what is noteworthy about otter poop?
Speaker 5: I definitely have never heard otter poop being described as violets.
Speaker 5: I have never smelled I've never smelled otter poop, but
Speaker 5: I would imagine it smells like the worst shit you
Speaker 5: could ever smell, because they're eating seafood, like a seafoodude,
Speaker 5: and that doesn't smell good. So I don't think I
Speaker 5: ever want to smell it. But I've never smelled it,
Speaker 5: but I would imagine it smelling the worst thing you
Speaker 5: could smell.
Speaker 1: Right, That's what I would think.
Speaker 4: Also, you know, we had a scatologist on who works
Speaker 4: at the Chicago Zoo and just has like thirteen freezers
Speaker 4: full of different zoo animal shit, so I may.
Speaker 1: Have to ask her.
Speaker 4: But first I asked the Internet about the smell of
Speaker 4: an otter turd, which is known scientifically as a sprint,
Speaker 4: and it can be accompanied by a musky glop known
Speaker 4: as anal jelly. And Ian Craft of the website total
Speaker 4: Ecology writes when fresh spray emits a distinct sweet odor
Speaker 4: that is not at all unpleasant, and her friend Tias
Speaker 4: Williams aka Science with Tyas on Twitter said it's similar
Speaker 4: to the odorous, sleep hungent waft of dog poop, but
Speaker 4: least with the fishiness of their marine diet. And doctor
Speaker 4: Danny Raviotti, author of the best selling book Does It Fart,
Speaker 4: told me it's acrid and fishy. Quote like a tin
Speaker 4: of anchovis and oil were left in the sun for
Speaker 4: four days and then a bunch of musky man perfume
Speaker 4: was sprayed on top of it. I also saw that
Speaker 4: Twitter user Forrester Sahita described the smell as similar to
Speaker 4: jasmine tea. Others said herrings in an ash tray freshly
Speaker 4: mown hay lavender.
Speaker 1: But no one's.
Speaker 4: First hand account topped that of Jim Manthorpe, who penned
Speaker 4: the BBC op ed quote the Delicious Scent of Otter Pooh,
Speaker 4: which contains this journey of a paragraph. Otter sprint is
Speaker 4: one of the least defensive smells in the world of excrement.
Speaker 4: It has a slightly fishy punch and odor. It is
Speaker 4: a delight. Whenever I see it, I plant my knees
Speaker 4: in the grass, lean over and draw its delicious smell
Speaker 4: into my lungs. Okay, Jim, I needed fact, though not opinion,
Speaker 4: so I reached out to scatology guest Rachel Santomoor aka
Speaker 4: Doctor Pooh, and she responded with alacrity, bless her, writing
Speaker 4: me quote. Otters live in and around water, so they
Speaker 4: eat fish, among other aquatic and non aquatic species, so
Speaker 4: otter poo can be quite smelly. After reading the Delicious
Speaker 4: Scent of Otter Pooh, she writes, it seems to me
Speaker 4: that Otter Pooh reminds the author of the sea.
Speaker 1: Think about when you go to.
Speaker 4: The ocean and it smells a little fishy and salty.
Speaker 4: It smells like the ocean, a place where you want
Speaker 4: to be, a place that reminds you of summer vacation,
Speaker 4: sand castles, body surfing, being with your family and relaxing,
Speaker 4: she writes. She continues, so even though otter pooh is smelly,
Speaker 4: it reminds the author of something they like and where
Speaker 4: they want to be. So y'all, as long as it
Speaker 4: doesn't hurt anyone, find your joy, cut bangs, text your crush,
Speaker 4: sniff on a sprint. Now, what do you do if
Speaker 4: you would like to use different holes in your face
Speaker 4: to experience and otter? Any tips on seeing them rather
Speaker 4: than sniffing?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 4: Patrons Kate Alward, Sheila Zinc, Kelly Salmon, Winny's Witch, and
Speaker 4: Miranda Panda all desperately wanted otter spotter tips. What about
Speaker 4: some of the field work that you have gotten to do?
Speaker 4: And there are several folks and all listen to and
Speaker 4: aside who want to know if you have any tips
Speaker 4: for spotting them in the wild. Do you get to
Speaker 4: get out there with like, you know, fleece and down
Speaker 4: vests and binoculars and get out there to look for them?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I've done that. A couple of times. I
Speaker 5: was primarily trying to film their toolsing behavior so we
Speaker 5: could try to quantify the kinematics behind it. So, I mean,
Speaker 5: I call it. It's not really I mean, I guess
Speaker 5: you could technically call it field work, but it's basically
Speaker 5: you go to the beach and you just have a
Speaker 5: little camping chairs, set up the camera and just hang
Speaker 5: out there until you see an audit that's close enough
Speaker 5: to start filming or take photos of it. And like,
Speaker 5: it's California, so it's like, what a nice seventy sunny day,
Speaker 5: can't complain? Yeah, so it's not. Yeah, yeah, it's obviously
Speaker 5: very rough field work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds absolutely terrible.
Speaker 4: I hope you don't have like a sandwich or anything,
Speaker 4: or nice cold beverage like, ugh, that's awful.
Speaker 5: I usually I usually go with the chocolate croissants.
Speaker 1: That sounds like the best thing ever.
Speaker 4: Becky the Secret Scientist again, you know, Becky wanted to know,
Speaker 4: is a group of otters really called a frolic? And
Speaker 4: if not, can you make that official?
Speaker 1: Is that real? Are they called a frolic?
Speaker 5: I've never heard of that, but I like it. It makes sense.
Speaker 1: Okay, well then good, it's called that now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I just if we all just start using that,
Speaker 5: it'll eventually catch on. I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's hereby known as a frolic. Horrible news. Again,
Speaker 4: I'm so sorry we jumped the gun here. It's already
Speaker 4: got a name, and it's not a frolic. A group
Speaker 4: of otters is called a romp. On land in the water,
Speaker 4: it's called a raft. And I searched for literally hours.
Speaker 4: Nowhere in the literature could I find any mention of
Speaker 4: them being called a frolic. Romp goes back to the
Speaker 4: fourteen hundreds when there was a tome called the Book
Speaker 4: of Saint Albert, and it listed plural nouns for different animals, including,
Speaker 4: let's just do it. Let's list a couple, an embarrassment
Speaker 4: of pandas passel of possums, a conspiracy of lemurs, a
Speaker 4: committee of mongooses, a thunder of hippopotami, and many others,
Speaker 4: including a grumble of pugs, perhaps grouchy from having a
Speaker 4: vertebra stolen. But Nature writer Nicholas Lund has gone on
Speaker 4: record and reported, no, these terms are not widely used scientifically,
Speaker 4: no matter how old they are.
Speaker 1: But romp is legit. It's established.
Speaker 4: If you were to visit the Wikipedia page list of
Speaker 4: animal names. I'm telling you right now, the lead image
Speaker 4: they have on the page is of a sea otter,
Speaker 4: so romp it is sorry babies, Amelia Frank wants to know.
Speaker 4: I always hear on nature shows about how vital it
Speaker 4: is that otter moms keep their babies dry. But then
Speaker 4: like they hold them on their bellies and there is
Speaker 4: inevitably some flipper or tail dropping the water. So do
Speaker 4: they have to keep them one hundred percent dry? Because
Speaker 4: that sounds anxiety provoking, Amelia says, should they not get soaked?
Speaker 1: Can you get it? Can you get one wet? Or
Speaker 1: is it like a gremlin?
Speaker 5: No, they're definitely waterproof. They can get wet. The reason
Speaker 5: why the mom is trying to dry it out, it's
Speaker 5: just to conserve heat. It's also cleaning the furs. So
Speaker 5: otters spend like a third of their life just cleaning, grooming,
Speaker 5: just to make because they rely on that fur as
Speaker 5: that insulation, they have to make sure that it's clean
Speaker 5: from all that dirt or debris or whatever, to make
Speaker 5: sure it's actually functioning so that fur doesn't clump up
Speaker 5: and expose its skin to the cold environment. So they
Speaker 5: really really want to get those pups nice and clean,
Speaker 5: and usually it also happened to dry them out.
Speaker 4: Okay, all right, so it's not It's definitely not like
Speaker 4: if a drop of water gets on this, it's you're
Speaker 4: screwed forever, right Okay?
Speaker 5: Oh no, yeahs sears are born to be in the water.
Speaker 4: So Courtney Ka wants to know if river otters actually
Speaker 4: have a communal toilet?
Speaker 5: Do they have, like midtens, I think so, but don't
Speaker 5: quote me on that. What river otters do a lot, though,
Speaker 5: is that they'll mark territory, So they'll basically leave scent
Speaker 5: marks all over the place, and they might go to
Speaker 5: the same location all the time just to make sure
Speaker 5: that that's, you know, the boundary of their territory. So
Speaker 5: maybe that is related to that.
Speaker 4: The otter potties side note, are called latrines, and they
Speaker 4: are considered to be hangout destinations where dude otters catch
Speaker 4: up and exchange information, kind of like walking onto the
Speaker 4: set of Cheers, but instead of Bruce Ki's, it's Pooh Pooski's.
Speaker 4: Also speaking of chilling, I feel like this is an
Speaker 4: appropriate place to inform you that an otter's den is
Speaker 4: also called a couch. You know what, let's talk teeth
Speaker 4: patrons jesseb Jesse Hurlbert and even had questions. A few
Speaker 4: people wanted to know about their teeth. Anna Zimmer says,
Speaker 4: I recently heard an otter chewing. I was tens of
Speaker 4: feet away across the water and could barely believe my ears.
Speaker 1: Tell me about their chompers.
Speaker 5: So otters, or at least see otter teeth look very
Speaker 5: similar to ours. They're at least their molars. It's nice
Speaker 5: and big and flat, perfect just to crunch things. So
Speaker 5: often if you go to where sars are and you're
Speaker 5: really quiet, you can actually hear them crunching on that
Speaker 5: hard shell. And it's actually pretty amazing. And what's super
Speaker 5: cool about those the adaptations that is that they're enamel
Speaker 5: on their molars are actually fracture resistant, So they've evolved
Speaker 5: to basically be able to sustain all that fracture forces
Speaker 5: from the prey they're eating. Because if you imagine, if
Speaker 5: you are trying to eat through clam shells, your teeth
Speaker 5: would get destroyed.
Speaker 4: Oh you'd be so ect Yeah, your dentist would be like,
Speaker 4: thank you. What makes it fracture resistant? Do they have
Speaker 4: a ton of people in like DARPA trying to figure
Speaker 4: out otter teeth so they can make better weapons or something.
Speaker 5: So I don't know about that, but there are definitely
Speaker 5: people that have looked at the material properties of those teeth,
Speaker 5: and I don't remember exactly what the kind of minerals
Speaker 5: they have, but they've done comparisons with like ancient humans
Speaker 5: that had much bigger jaws and bigger molars to crush
Speaker 5: those types of seeds as well, and it's very similar
Speaker 5: morphologies and it's pretty pretty impressive. So it's like kind
Speaker 5: of through convergent evolution that this type of molars have
Speaker 5: have evolved to be a perfect teeth to crush things.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: For more on this, you can see the two thousand
Speaker 4: and nine paper enthusiastically titled the Remarkable Resilience of Teeth,
Speaker 4: which straight up compares the strength of a human molar
Speaker 4: to a sea otters and humans maximum load eighty seven
Speaker 4: pounds of byte force, but otters over one hundred more
Speaker 4: than a cheetah, almost as much as a wolf. But
Speaker 4: how do see Otter molars not split while they're chopping
Speaker 4: on clamshells? Oh, they do, they do split, but this
Speaker 4: paper said that they're molars and ours crack all the
Speaker 4: time in microfissures and then proteins rush in to spackle them,
Speaker 4: but still don't eat rocks. On the topic of hardness,
Speaker 4: what about the hardest thing about your job, the hardest
Speaker 4: thing about being an utologist.
Speaker 1: There's got to be soilu sex.
Speaker 5: There's just so many things to learn about them, there's
Speaker 5: not enough time. So like, we know so much about
Speaker 5: sea otters, oh relatively, just because they're easier to study,
Speaker 5: But in terms of the other otters, especially the ones
Speaker 5: that are like in Asia or South America, those ones
Speaker 5: are very are much harder to study, just because their
Speaker 5: locations and because their population sizes are either shrinking or
Speaker 5: we have no idea. There's actually another otter species down
Speaker 5: in South America called the marine otter, and it looks
Speaker 5: like a river otter, but it actually lives in a
Speaker 5: marine environment too, and it actually eats a lot of
Speaker 5: hardshell prey too, But we have barely any idea of
Speaker 5: like what exactly it's doing, what it's population sizes, it
Speaker 5: it might not be doing well just because there's not
Speaker 5: a lot of work done on them, and just in
Speaker 5: these remote locations.
Speaker 4: What do you love the most about them? What do
Speaker 4: you just fall in love with when it comes to
Speaker 4: doing this work.
Speaker 5: It's just there's just such interesting animals. The fact that
Speaker 5: they have this integration between their tool using behavior, their
Speaker 5: morphology is just unique compared to other things, Like, it's
Speaker 5: just interesting that they are able to gain access to
Speaker 5: these harder prey. One thing I didn't touch on is
Speaker 5: that in Monterey Bay, these orters actually exhibit dietary specialization.
Speaker 5: So some ters will only eat urchins, others won't only
Speaker 5: eat clams, others will only eat crabs, and so on.
Speaker 5: So part of my research now is actually trying to
Speaker 5: investigate why that is or how they're actually able to
Speaker 5: eat these different type of prey. So how is it
Speaker 5: relating to the tool using behavior, and how is it
Speaker 5: relating back to their variation and their biting ability? So
Speaker 5: as in, are some orders just able to generate larger
Speaker 5: bite forces than other orders? So that's type of questions
Speaker 5: that we're hoping to be able to answer soon.
Speaker 4: Is that regional like little pockets or is it completely
Speaker 4: individual like one sister might be eating urchins while the
Speaker 4: brothers eating clams.
Speaker 5: Yes, so right, now that's I think primarily found just
Speaker 5: in California, and it goes back to that carrying capacity.
Speaker 5: So because that population is limited in terms of resources
Speaker 5: and food, instead of each individual being a journalist basically
Speaker 5: eat everything they can get, they just become super specialized
Speaker 5: and just become really good at eating a particular prey.
Speaker 5: So one individual will just become a really good urchent
Speaker 5: specialist and an urchin sposteralists. There's a certain way you
Speaker 5: have to extract them, a certain way. You have to
Speaker 5: like open them and eat them, versus like an abalone specialist,
Speaker 5: which uses completely different behaviors in order to get the
Speaker 5: abalony and eat it. So they just become these really
Speaker 5: highly specialized individuals that really are able to get access
Speaker 5: to these different prey items and do it so well
Speaker 5: that and efficiently, And that's just the way that they
Speaker 5: can increase that caloric income versus just becoming just a
Speaker 5: journalist and eat everything they see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so funny.
Speaker 4: It's absolutely me eating scrambled egg for dinner like it's fine.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean yeah, once you once you know how
Speaker 5: to do it, just go for it. Right, Well, I
Speaker 5: learned something new. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I love the idea of someone peeking through my windows
Speaker 4: being like, make a note she's having she's having scrambled
Speaker 4: eggs for dinner too.
Speaker 5: Well, that's the thing with these otters that you know
Speaker 5: they're there. They're flipper tag so people can actually id them,
Speaker 5: and usually the Moneray Bay Aquarium has lots of volunteers
Speaker 5: to go out to observe these otters on a daily basis,
Speaker 5: so they're basically if you were out there, they would
Speaker 5: be tracking how many eggs did you use, how did
Speaker 5: you pretty salt, did you use a fork? How did
Speaker 5: you cook your eggs? So essentially they're basically tracking all
Speaker 5: of that informations that are tracking how many pray ams
Speaker 5: they're eating, what kind of prey items, and estimate the
Speaker 5: size of those prey items where they use tools for
Speaker 5: that prey item. It's pretty nuts. Wow, it's pretty amazing data.
Speaker 4: I bet the people who have to organize the volunteer
Speaker 4: staff at the Monterey Bay Aquarium they must get so
Speaker 4: many folks who are like, if you need a you
Speaker 4: need a volunteer to watch the ut, I'm available.
Speaker 1: I'm available. That's gotta be a long list of right.
Speaker 5: I mean, who doesn't want to spend a nice, nice
Speaker 5: morning hanging out by the coast and watching some sea
Speaker 5: otters eat their dinner or eat their breakfast.
Speaker 4: I mean yeah, well, meanwhile, someone's watching you and being
Speaker 4: like doctor Law is having another chocolate croissant.
Speaker 1: We don't know why.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, the artist could totally be just watch
Speaker 5: me back.
Speaker 1: I hope they are.
Speaker 4: Thank you so so much for being on. This is
Speaker 4: a joy.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I hate hotters more than I thought.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks for definitely having me on.
Speaker 4: So ask smart people shameless questions as always, and then
Speaker 4: just sit back and real and horror. You can follow
Speaker 4: doctor Chris Law on Twitter at Chris underscore j Underscore Law,
Speaker 4: and you can enjoy otters from a distance. You can
Speaker 4: join them online if you sniff a sprain. I'd like
Speaker 4: to hear about it. I don't know if I do
Speaker 4: want to Actually, I do want to hear about it.
Speaker 4: I do want to hear about it. We're at ologies
Speaker 4: on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one
Speaker 4: L on both Ologiesmarch dot Com has bucket hats, has
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Speaker 4: to get one. Hashtag ologies merch and pictures and we'll
Speaker 4: repost you. Also, thank you to every patron who makes
Speaker 4: the show possible. At patreon dot com, slash Ologies cost
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Speaker 4: submit questions. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the
Speaker 4: Ologies podcast Facebook group, with assists from Bonnie Dutch and
Speaker 4: Shannon Feltis of the comedy podcast Do You Are That?
Speaker 4: Thank you Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling, so much help,
Speaker 4: Susan Hale handles merch and so much more. Thank you
Speaker 4: to Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and Mercedes Maitland of mindgam Media
Speaker 4: for making Smologies episodes, which are classroom friendly filth free
Speaker 4: short versions of classics up for free in the feed
Speaker 4: and at aliward dot com slash Smologies. Emily White of
Speaker 4: the word Toree makes our professional transcripts and Caleb patten
Speaker 4: Bleep's episodes those are available for free on our website
Speaker 4: at aliward dot com slash Ologies dash Extras. Kelly ar
Speaker 4: Dwyer makes the website and can make yours. Nick Thorburn
Speaker 4: made the theme music and editing was done by the
Speaker 4: quite handsome writer and published poet Jared Sleeper, who just
Speaker 4: debuted his first ever book. It's called one hundred Poems.
Speaker 4: I'm putting a link in the show notes to it
Speaker 4: because he has a gorgeous, beautiful brain that strings together
Speaker 4: words so well on hundred Poems by Jarret Sleeper.
Speaker 1: I'm so thrilled about it. I literally could cry.
Speaker 4: If you listen to the end of the episode, you know,
Speaker 4: I tell you a secret, And this week it's that
Speaker 4: we fought off COVID.
Speaker 1: So that's good.
Speaker 4: I'm still back in LA for a little bit since
Speaker 4: my dad was feeling stronger and we were just hovering
Speaker 4: too much. In the last few weeks have maybe been
Speaker 4: the most anxiety I.
Speaker 1: Maybe have ever fought in my life. But we're taking
Speaker 1: it day by day. Okay.
Speaker 4: So the new fresh secret for this encore is that
Speaker 4: this episode went up on a Tuesday in July of
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two, and a few days later, before the
Speaker 4: next episode even came out, my sweet sweet dad, your
Speaker 4: grandpa had passed away into the as we say, the
Speaker 4: granule everything of the universe. It was so it was
Speaker 4: so weird, and it was also so sweet. And all
Speaker 4: the episodes I'd ever done, my dad's voice had never
Speaker 4: been in one before, and it was in all of
Speaker 4: your ears that week, the very week that he passed away. Also,
Speaker 4: you wonderful Aligites were so caring and so lovely to
Speaker 4: me through all of this, And I remember telling Jared
Speaker 4: in the weeks after, just how I felt very lucky
Speaker 4: that so many people were mourning my dad at the
Speaker 4: same time I was, because you know, I know he
Speaker 4: was dear to you. He cared so much about critters.
Speaker 4: He had a lot of curiosity. He was a very
Speaker 4: gentle dude. So this Otter's episode always been a lot
Speaker 4: to me because it had his voice in it, and
Speaker 4: it came out right as he kind of slipped away. Also,
Speaker 4: just horrific trivia. The gossip you will have for days.
Speaker 4: The lives ruined, the Otter pr absolutely destroyed. Okay, that's
Speaker 4: it for me, Back to soup, Back to bed, new
Speaker 4: episode next week. I'm going to be on the menda,
Speaker 4: I promise. Okay, bye bye, pacadermatology, amiology, your doo, zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, peratology,
Speaker 4: the apology, seriology, seology. What are we looking at?
Speaker 3: We're looking at sea otters, six of them. Here.
Speaker 1: They go down to the bottom. They get a stone
Speaker 1: and they go down to the bottom.
Speaker 3: They get a seashell and then they smash the shell
Speaker 3: with the stone at that it's cooling.
Speaker 1: It get value.
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