Otters don't have a blubber layer like most marine mammals, it's the fur that keeps them warm and allows them to live in Alaskan waters." A sea otter feeding in Glacier Bay, Alaska photographed by ...

Sea otters are critical players in marine ecosystems and are a keystone species, meaning they have a profound effect on their ...

A devastating sea star plague triggered an unexpected ecological shift, creating a mussel boom that sea otters turned into a ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

New research led by Monterey Bay Aquarium reveals a surprising ripple effect in coastal ecosystems: the collapse of one ...

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 ...

Today, northern sea otter populations can be found along the Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington coast, as well as in Russia and along the Bering Strait. The southern sea otter population ...

RANGE: Sea otters can be found in California, Washington, Canada, Alaska, Russia, and Japan. At one time, otter populations inhabited a contiguous range from Japan around the Pacific coastline down to ...