Jim Estes, a retired USGS scientist and the paper's co-author, spent his career researching sea otters and how their presence along rocky shorelines shaped kelp forests. While working on remote ...

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, sea otters have recolonized Glacier Bay National Park with a vengeance. Several times each July, when the weather over southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National ...

Sea otter mamas are parenting on hard mode. They give birth in the water, to blind, helpless infants who have to be carried ...

In North America sea otters once ranged from Baja California, Mexico, all the way to Alaska. Between 1741 and 1911, the maritime fur trade fueled voracious large-scale hunting and trapping that ...

fur seal and sea otter pelts they brought showed this land to be a fur trader's paradise. Russian documents from the time indicate that Bering's explorations of Alaska were not made for the purely ...

Sea otters were once common around the North Pacific but were eradicated from southeast Alaska by about A.D. 1830 due to the commercial fur trade. In the 1960s, sea otters were re-introduced to ...

Three-part series examining the harsh elements and rich rewards of the Alaskan wilderness. A mother sea otter nurses her baby through the chilly days of early spring. Show more Alaska is one of ...

While working on remote Alaskan islands, he found where sea otters were absent, sea urchin populations mushroomed, overtaking kelp forests. He concluded the small mammal was integral to ...