Ologies with Alie Ward - Lutrinology (OTTERS) with Chris J. Law

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

YOU’RE NOT READY. But it’s time. Otters. Sea otters. River otters. Big beefy otters. Tiny otters. Giant river otters. Otters chasing you down the street. Dr. Chris J. Law, a professional Lutrinologist, shares tales about coastal vs. inland otters, otter terrorism, magical teeth, lustrous fur, rock pockets, kelp naps, otter terrorism, cautionary motherhood, toxic relationships, hand holding and why otters make you trust them, despite the fact that you should perhaps not trust an otter.  Dr. Chris J. Law’s website and sci-artFollow Dr. Chris J. Law on Twitter A donation was made to SeaOtterSavvy.orgMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesYou may also enjoy our episodes on: Echniniology (SEA URCHINS), Osteology (SKELETONS & BODY FARMS), Ichthyology (FISHES), Oceanology (THE SEA)Jarrett Sleeper’s 100 PoemsSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey. It's a lone air pod under the bench at a bus stop, Allie Ward, back with fresh horrors for you. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. But straight up, if kids are listening with you, think about hightailing it right now to a Smologies episode instead. They're in the main podcast feed. They're up at alleyward.com slash Smologies, which is linked in the show notes. Smologies are short and classroom safe. This one is not. It is not. Are we good? Good. Okay. Let's get to Otters. First off, thank you, listener Isiah Neubens, who suggested this guest in particular after hearing a review I read from AWIX from the Urology episode. And AWIX dreamed that Lutrology was an episode. And your dreams are coming true right now,

all of our dreams. Also, thank you just to everyone for leaving and writing reviews. They matter so much. I read every single one. And this week, we hit a really big lifelong goal of mine because of your reviews and subscribing. And Ologies was the number one science podcast on Apple. It's been five years. We hit number one, people. Let's do some air horns and a tiny, imperceptible butt dance. Good job. Huge, giant goal. I can't believe it. Thank you so much. Thanks also to everyone on Patreon.com slash Ologies for supporting the show. Each week, though, for reviews, I pick a fresh one to prove that I see them all. And this week, thank you to Shermworm, who wrote, Come for the Science Facts, Stay for the Fields.

And also, thank you, futurologist Mackenzie King, who described the show as a massage to my brain while drinking espresso. Okay, get into it. Lutrology. It's a word. It's been cited in the literature one time, but that counts. J. C. Vaughn Voppelklein, a prominent scholar of crustaceans, coined it while describing a study about sea otters that was so well written, it was an interesting read, quote, even for the non-lutronologist. So, lutrious side note comes from a mix of old, old words for water, hence otter, water, water. And then the L, they think, was maybe picked up from lupus, like a water wolf, or ludo, meaning to play. It's anyone's guess. But otters are in the same musty lid family as weasels and wolverines and minks and also badgers,

and they are full of must and musk and mischief. And you're about to get absolutely destroyed by otter facts. Your small talk will never recover. Otters will be all you think about for the remainder of your life. Also, with that, I have to issue a trigger and a content warning without spoiling too much. Otters are not, not violent, and many of their behaviors would result in criminal charges if water weasels had a justice system. But in other ways, they're better at relationships than we are. Now, this otter expert studied environmental systems for undergrad and got his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, and is now doing a postdoc at the University of Washington in connection with the American Museum

of Natural History and the University of Texas. So buckle up, boy, howdy. Hot damn. Get ready for coastal versus inland otters, skull morphology that tricks our brains, teeth, fur, beach pastries, rock pockets, the perils of selfless motherhood, kelp naps, the nostalgia of otter droppings, molar crunching, and of course, otter handholding with scientist and certified otter expert, Lutronologist Dr. Chris Law. My name is Chris Law, and I go by he, him. Cool. And Dr. Correct. Yes. Dr. Law. Dr. Chris Law. We had a suggestion for this ology a few weeks ago. Someone had a dream also that there was an otter's episode, and they woke up and looked for it, and then they realized that they just

dreamt it up. And so that is why we hustled to find you because someone had a need for an otter episode. So can you tell me how you came to be a weasel wizard? Yeah. So I essentially started my science career with polychaete worms during my undergrad at UC San Diego. These are bristly segmented marine worms, which are almost as cute as otters if you're into worms. And then as I was applying grad school, I met with my future PhD advisor Rita Mada at UC Santa Cruz, and we're just chatting about potential research projects, and she studies more eels. So I was just assuming I was going to be working on some fish project, which is fine, because my plan is just go up the food chain. But then we were just chatting a little bit,

and she's just brought up the idea, why don't you just work on sea otters because we're in Santa Cruz, and they're just all over the place. And obviously I was like, yeah, of course. So Chris has lived up and down the sunny Pacific coast in San Diego and Santa Cruz and Orange County. And like nearly every Californian, he was familiar with sea otters. So the suggestion to work on them was like, hell yes, jackpot, jackpotter. I've seen them before, and they're adorable little teddy bears that you just want to hug, and who doesn't want to work on them? So the moment she said that, kind of just jumped on that bandwagon and started doing some research into what potential projects I could do. And since they eat all these hardshell parietums,

one of the questions we really wanted to look at is just, how are they actually breaking into those hard items? So kind of just got started on that. So basically in undergrad, I come from a like a phylogenetics background and evolutionary background. So I'm kind of halfway through working with sea otters or starting to look into sea otters. I just got this idea, I have to build a phylogenetic tree of all of the, not only otters, but the weasels, marnes, wolverines, all those guys. So I just started building that phylogenetic tree and then just learning a bunch of natural history by reading about this group. Like I at first didn't even know that weasels were related to otters. So learned more about weasels and kind of went this down this rabbit hole to want to

study why they sew elongate. Yeah, they are like the doxins of the sea. Why are they so long and squiggly? The idea is that it came around 15 or so million years ago. That's during the mid-massine climate transition when temperatures drastically decreased and this expansion of grasslands occurred, which then led to the diversification of rodents. So then this biolongation is hypothesized to allow those weasel-like creatures to go underground to chase all those rodents and these tight crevices and whatnot. Wow, I had no idea that that is why bodies were long. I mean, is that what doxins are doing? Aren't they kind of like rodent hole dwellers? Yeah, so that's the idea behind their kind of artificial selection where people really are

trying to breed these elongate looking dogs so they can go in these tight crevices or burrows to try to get those rodents during hunting. Are they just chock full of vertebrae? Do they have more vertebrae or do they just have longer vertebrae than other animals? That is a fascinating question. So if you think of snakes or eels, they become more elongate by just simply adding more vertebrae, which makes sense, right? But then with mammals, we're actually constrained to the number of vertebrae that we have. So in carnivorans, which like dogs, bears, cats, they have about 20 thoracic lumbar vertebrae and that number rarely, rarely changes. So it can't become elongate by just adding additional vertebrae.

They have to actually evolve relatively longer vertebrae. I was always wondering that about like my short-ish poodle dog versus a doxin or like a weasel, those long, almost wormy bodies just have longer backbones each individually. Yeah, exactly. So they have the exact same number of vertebrae. It's just some of the breeds might have relatively longer ones, although I don't think anybody has really looked into that. So it would be really interesting to see the skeletal elements of what actually contributes to those different body plans and these different breeds. So yes, every time you see a dog that you would like to pet, know that it has 30 main vertebrae

and then between five to 23 bonus tailbones and corgis, side note, they're born with tails. Did you know that big bushy fox tails? Google it. Same with Australian shepherds and other herding dogs, but they tend to get the chop by breeders because when they were actually used for herding, no one wanted a stomped on tail. And I read one 2018 study titled C7 vertebra Homo aortic transformation in domestic dogs are pug dogs breaking mammalian evolutionary constraints, which found that 25 percent of pugs have one fewer vertebrae than all other breeds. And I like to think that there's some berobed man in the sky and God took a vertebra from a snorting, farting pug dog and made humans with it. Now, how many do you have? Well, you were

probably born with 33, but you now have around 24. What happened? Dad, I think you ate the bones. Nope, they just kind of fused together at the bottom like a bag of raisinettes you left in a hot car. Only it's your sacral spine and your coccyx. For more on this, see the osteology episode. But enough about us, let's talk about gazing and wonder at otters. Now, Chris also happens to make really gorgeous science art charting the evolution of these mammals in this beautiful, colorful detail. And where in the tree of life are they? Because I feel like I think of an otter and it seems like a cat, an aquatic cat, but also kind of like an upside down dog. What's happening? Yeah. So it's in the order carnivora. And carnivora is

split into two different main groups, the phylloforms, which are like your cats. And then the other group are the caniforms, which are your dogs, bears, pinnipeds, and the muscle lords, which are the raccoons, weasels, skunks, otters, all those guys. So basically, in the caniforms, it goes dogs, bears, pinnipeds, then skunks, the red panda, raccoons, and then the mustelids, which includes that really species rich group that includes the otters, the weasels, the wolverine, the martens, the honey badger, the European badger. There's like over 60 species in mustelidae. Do you dream about this stuff? Because I know you make art about phylogenetic trees. Does your brain, is it always trying to kind of construct visuals of this? Yeah. I mean,

that's why I love like learning how to make phylogenetic trees. I think it's just such a cool way to just like showcase the evolutionary history of like, basically the tree of life. And with the carnivores in general, like it's such a diverse group and like so many different types of body plans and different sizes and shapes. So it's really cool to be able to visualize all that and like how this one species came from this group of species or how these two closely related species are from the same part of tree, but then look so very different. So yeah, that's part of the fun parts of being an evolutionary biologist. Are you an organized person in general? I pretend to be. It comes and goes. No question. What is it like to be an otterologist? Do you get to touch

them? Do you get to hold them? Do you get to pet their fur? Do you get to touch a pelt? Do you get to hold their hand? Do they give you clamps? What is your life like? Oh, I mean, I wish I could do all of that. The closest I've done is touched one. It is honestly the softest thing, at least the sea otter, it's the softest thing I've ever felt. I totally understood or understand why people back in the day really wanted to hunt them just because that pelt like you just want to rub your face on them because it's just so soft and I'm sure it's also pretty warm. In terms of doing all the other stuff, in terms of wanting to hold their hands, I don't think I would ever want to do that with the wild otter because they will try to bite your face if they could. They're pure evil.

They are pure evil, says Dr. Chris Law, a professional leutronologist. You knew this was coming, didn't you? Okay, I'm glad we jumped right into that because I feel like somehow I became informed a few years ago that otters, the cutest things ever, also absolute bastards, evil sexual predators, they will steal your stuff and sell it at a pawn shop. They're the worst. Give us a dark side. How fucked up are otters? Oh, I mean, yeah. Basically everything you said is true. Probably the worst thing is that they can also be dog killers. So apparently there are a couple incidents where somebody's dog was just like barking at one of these otters along like the dock or something. And I guess that otter just

got fed up, went up to it and just apparently dragged it down. And I believe it might have drowned it, but again, this is just through word of mouth. So who knows. But meanwhile, in Alaska, otters are terrorizing Anchorage citizens, literally chasing and sinking teeth into a nine-year-old boy. And this is not the first time. According to one news source, officials are currently investigating whether the incidents all involve the same group of otters. And it's not just in the last frontier. It's also in the Sunshine State. Cell phone video of a charging otter. This is a picture of the alleged otter sent to us by Greg Butler. Butler says the otter attacked his dog Chester. Chester was bitten on the nose after an otter charged

through his screened-in porch. Two of his human neighbors were bitten on their heels and hands. This otter comes flying out of the lake, just starts to chase my bike. Actually, just went right after my bike. So while rare, these incidents are not isolated, and in communities all over the globe, fearful locals demand of officials. You ought to get that otter otter here. I've heard this a couple times and this has happened a couple times. So it's kind of gnarly. I mean, how big are they? Because I feel like river otters are bigger, right? How because sea otter? And also, what's the difference between a river otter and a sea otter? Oh, so actually, a sea otter is much bigger than a North American river otter. But in California,

they don't get that big. Those are more Alaskan otters, but they're still much bigger than a little river otter. And just to back up a little bit, there are 13 species of otter globally. The U.S. has two species, the little river otter, about the same weight as a pug, and then the sea otters, which of California can be up to 90 pounds, like a rottweiler. Although the beefier Alaskan variety can top 100 Libbys. Think like a Bernese mountain dog, floating around gnawing on a crab. Now, there are also Eurasian otters, about 20 pounds, docks in size, and some medium-sized African otters, South American giant river otters, which are somewhere between an American river otter and a sea otter in size. And then there's the teeny Chihuahua-sized Asian otters. But yes,

in the U.S., I was surprised that the river otters were smaller and that the sea otters were these hefty clam-eating sea beasts. They're big and they're not cuddly. Definitely can be pretty vicious if you get too close to them. How did some evolve to hang out in fresh water and others sea water? Or does it even matter? Because they're breathing air, right? I'm amazed we don't all have fins and gills. Yeah, so actually all other otters are primarily fresh water. So it's the sea otter that's unique. It's that oddball that evolved from all the other otters, like about eight to 10 million years ago. And it went on basically its own evolutionary trajectory. So everything it does, everything about their physiology is very different compared to other river otters. And sea

otters are primarily just found in the ocean. Whereas river otters, especially like North American river otters and Eurasian otters, will actually go into the marine environment as well. So you can find, you can be in locations like in Washington where there will be both river otters and sea otters. Oh, where are they sleeping? Do they go home at night? Sea otters? Either one. Like do they sleep in the water or do they have like a cave that they hang out in on shore? Yeah, so river otters have dens that they hang out. I've never actually seen one, but yeah, I'm presumably along to shore. But then sea otters actually just float in the water. And I'm sure you've heard stories of where they can go wrap themselves in some kelp so they don't float away. And they can take a nap

that way. They're relatively small marine mammals. They burn a lot of heat. So they have to sleep a lot to refuel. And you always see them like just taking the snooze to conserve some energy. Do you think they hold hands in the wild or is that just a publicity video from a zoo? So I don't, I actually don't know because I had, I remember giving a presentation at this, I think sea otter conference. And I had an image of that, you know, that image of two sea otters holding hands that was taken at one of the aquariums. And then somebody gave me shit for it without doing that because she said that they don't hold hands in the wild. But then apparently a couple weeks or months later, there's like some photos of wild otters holding hands. So I don't

know. So they have a good PR team. They're like, listen, TMZ is around the corner. We're gonna have to do something. Also shout out to Otter Paparazzi, Drew Wharton, the founder of seaotters.com who in 2016 captured the first photo of otters doing this in the wild. Like 100% a celebrity couple holding hands, walking into Nobu to eat a bunch of raw seafood. Also seaotters.com has live sea otter camps, if you would like to stare at them with like-minded people over the internet. What is the otterology community like? Are people really focused on conservation? Are they trying to figure out how to increase populations? Like is there a big conservation effort around these guys? Oh yeah, there's a huge effort out all the major aquariums. So like the Monterey Bay

Aquarium in California, the Seattle Aquarium in Washington, I'm sure up in BC and Alaska also has great efforts. But the one I'm most familiar with are the ones down in the Central Coast California where the Monterey Bay Aquarium, UC Santa Cruz, the US Geological Survey, Fish and Wildlife, basically all of these organizations, they do all of this great outreach work and also a lot of work with the wild populations to make sure that the population is doing well, that individuals are healthy, and that you know all the possible things that could affect them are looked into. How is their population like the sea otters for example? I feel like people are really rallying for the sea otters. Like how is their population like is it rebounding at all?

Because we just did an episode on urchins and they were like urchins are everywhere because sea otters are not. Yeah, so I guess it's very different depending on what population of sea otters you're talking about. So that kelp to urchin to sea otter system is really describing the Alaskan populations pretty well. So that classic killer whale is eating the sea otters, which then increases urchins, which then decreases kelp for us. But then in California, the system's a little bit different where the sea otter population is actually doing relatively stable. So I think there's about maybe 3,000 individuals in coastal California. I could be wrong on that. I have to check my numbers. He's right. But basically the idea is that they are kind of constrained between

like point consumption down south and half moon bay up north. And the reason why they can't expand is because they're being attacked by sharks up north. And I guess fishermen are pushing them back up from the south so they can't really expand. And that way they're more like this carrying capacity where they're running out of food and that otter population can't really increase because of that. So in California, they're stuck between a net and a shark place. And sea otters have been protected since the 1911 international fur seal treaty after colonization of North America led to a dangerous decline. And I looked into it and yep, there's about 3,000 sea otters off the coast of the Pacific in California. And then 90% of the world sea otters are off the coast of Alaska.

There's about 25,000 of them there. Now what about the river otters? It's estimated about 100,000 of North American river otters exist in the U.S. and Canada according to the banger of a paper, river otter status, management and distribution in the United States, evidence of large scale population increase and range expansion. So that's good. And of the world's 13 species, eight are threatened, including the Asian small clawed otter and the smooth-coated otter and one called the hairy-nosed otter, which sounds cute, but it might be ferocious. All of these otters are like, we got to make more otters. Also, I'm going to warn you right now, this next part contains scenarios and language that might be literally triggering to victims of

violence. Fucking otters, dude. Otters fucking, dude. Sex lives of otters. What's going on? How are they making more otters? Is it a horror show? It basically is very, it's basically just unfortunately. That's what I heard. That's what I heard. Yeah. It's not great people and I'm bleeping out a word that starts with R that means sexual assault. I know it can be hard for survivors to hear, so I'm just airing on the side of bleeping. Otters. So females have it rough because basically the moment they become sexually mature, they are either pregnant or have a baby with them or a pup with them until they literally exhaust to themselves to death and it's called end lactation syndrome for the females

where they just basically just die because they're just so exhausted from putting so much energy towards their pups or towards milk production and they also have to ford for their pups and I'll say one thing. Some of those pups are basically just like little parasites. I remember just watching a mom and a pup interact and this pup is almost bigger than the mom and it was just still hanging out with mom and the moment mom goes diving, the pup just like hangs out on the surface being all cute and happy but then when the mom prank comes up with food, it just immediately swims to the mom and just starts like crying and begging for food and again this pup is almost bigger than a mom. Basically pups usually stay with the mom for six months to up to a year and it's usually

those slackers that are staying up for a year are usually just as big as the mom still continually getting food from it. How did evolution allow for that? How can they sustain that these poor ladies and what are all the bachelors doing? Are they roving in packs of otters? Are there like packs of bachelor river otters just terrorizing? So yeah the evolution question I think it's just because that pup will be like nice and fat and ready to kind of go hunt on its own because if it gets weaned too early or leaves mom too early it's not going to be able to eat or get enough food and it's just going to die and in that case you're just going to lose your you know offspring and your genetic potential right if that happens so evolutionary you know there might be that reason

for why that pup really wants to extract all the nutrients from the mom before it can go off on its own and do its thing. Yeah in terms of the males oh yeah those guys don't do anything once basically the males are constantly circling females because once that pup leaves it's gonna go you know reproduce to pass off its genes and then once that happens I mean it's a it's a terrifying show that I mean I'm happy to describe it but you know give us the dirt 1000 content and trigger warnings so normally once once that female is free the male would get on it and then essentially where the male will bite onto the females nose so often you'll see females with ripped noses and you can easily tell that to female just because it's biting down on that nose and basically forcing itself on

it to to you know pass it's passage genes. Oh my god so once that happens the male just leaves and you'll probably never see the female ever again. I like want to file for restraining orders on behalf of female otters like this is not okay yeah it's not okay do they have any defenses like do they have thicker fur or do they have like an extra claw anywhere or like a mace? I don't think so and yeah and also the females are much smaller than than the males so they're kind of defenseless in that regard. Oh my god I want them to evolve a pepper spray gland that's horrible horrible I want them to go on strike and live in their own happy island I mean like get your own urchins. I know I know if only they could otherwise yeah like I said basically that's the female life and they do this

for maybe like 12-15 years at the most in the wild where basically they just get pregnant a couple times or like a lot of times during their lifetime and just reproduce and have pups and cycle just continues over and over again until they die from exhaustion it's pretty nuts. Oh what about in captivity we have no right obviously to enforce any of our like assumed ethics sexual ethics on otters but in captivity are they like hey dude knock it off or do they just have to let nature be terrible? No so usually in captivity all the all the otters that you might see in aquariums are all females because a lot of these bigger aquariums they actually use them as surrogates for wild otters that might be orphaned so like if the mom in the

wild dies there's usually this pup that's wandering alone and since they're threatened at least in California there's been a program to basically take these otters in and especially their females still have the surrogates raise them until they can re-release them in the wild when they're old enough. Do they do that in the wild do they like penguins do they adopt orphaned otters in the wild or is that kind of unique to captivity? That's usually unique to captivity I don't think I've ever heard in any situation where a wild female would take in another stray pup and usually if the stray pup is alone it's not going to even survive for that long because it's basically defenseless and helpless it can't even go catch its own food by itself so it'll just die so yeah

that's why you know like the one in a barricade really relies on stranding networks or like volunteers or people just you know observing or seeing a wild otter or like a little pup somebody will call it in and they'll send out a team to bring it in if they can't look at their mom or something like that. And I mean they're so cute but now I'm like a little mad at the pups too but why are they so cute from a morphological as someone who's studied their bone structure and how long noodle they are how and why are they so cute? That's a great question I don't know why they are so cute but how it's because their skulls are very flat faces so if you look at a basically a newborn CR school it doesn't have that snout pronounced snout yet so it's very like a

puppy dog face or like even like a newborn baby's face and which I guess in our brain it's hard wired to you know want to like take it and hold it and protect it and all that. This side note is called baby schema and it's when a juvenile organism has a large head and a round face and big eyes and smaller other features like ears and snout and mouth and fun fact Mickey Mouse has aged in reverse. His features have grown more babylike with each decade and when adults retain some cute characteristics our brains get confused and say protect them at all costs even if they are ghouls like your tiny racist grandma or a seat otter. But in terms of why they might be like that in the wild I have no idea like what kind of selective advantage that is maybe other animals

think it's cute or maybe their mom or other otter individuals might might have some kind of selective pressure on it but I have no idea. I'm gonna go back to school I'm gonna get a PhD in otters they're so cute because their babies are such assholes that you would literally not feed them if they weren't so cute. Can I ask you some questions from listeners who know that you're coming on the show? Yeah. Okay we're just gonna lightning run we're gonna see how many we can get through is that cool? Yep sounds great. But before we crack into your questions we're gonna toss some coins into an ocean of need and Chris chose sea otter savvy which increases awareness of protecting sea otters and encourages responsible viewing guidelines and for more about what they

do and to check out volunteer opportunities see sea ottersavvy.org and savvy has two v's and not two a's and I always mess that up but yes a donation went to sea ottersavvy.org thanks to sponsors. Okay your questions the first being from an actual patron of the show okay first question from a very important listener named Larry Ward also known as Grand Pod around here it's my dad he wanted to know do they eat kelp or do they just live in kelp? That's a good question I don't know do they eat kelp or do they just live in the kelp? Yeah so otters don't eat the kelp they just live in it so they'll use it and wrap it wrap themselves in it to you know stay in one place if they're sleeping but they really rely on it indirectly just because it's such an important

ecosystem in California where all their basically invertebrate prey that they're eating live off it or live under it or live on it so it is really essential to them indirectly. So it's like their apartment and the grocery store all at once? Exactly yeah and yeah they rarely leave it just because it's a nice protected area so it's harder for predators to find them. Nice are they meat eaters only they are carnivores right they typically just exist on just sushi buffet? Yep they essentially eat your favorite types of seafood so you got your snails your clams your mussels your abalone your crabs and urchins they also eat these kind of gross looking things called fat and keeper worms I don't know if you ever see a picture of them. Yes I have they look like dicks they look like

disembodied horrible floopy dildos. Listen okay listen these worms are also called penis fish and I'm a fan of a phallus trust me on that but you have to imagine them just poking up like whack-a-mole's in the mud just like slurp slurp slurp boing and when it's time to go potty fat and keeper worms squirt a steady liquid stream out of one end and sometimes beaches are littered with these flaccid worms they're beached by the thousands like the most surreal dumb truck accident you've ever seen but they're also a delicacy and they're considered an aphrodisiac and like most things it's really just set and setting. They're not as picturesque as maybe you would want them to be but yeah so fat and keeper worms is what they're called. Yeah so they'll eat those as well

but most of their prey are usually hard shell prey because they contain more calories. Aha okay that brings us to a question that everybody asked Jamie McNeill Jaikou's first time question asker Francesca Huggins, Lenny Ozalith, Jesse Hurdlemore, Alicia Henning, Emma Sherwood, Mariah McGregor. Everyone wanted to know in Jaikou's words is there a commonality between otters favorite rocks? Like do most otters use one particular kind of rock? Do they have a favorite rock? Jamie McNeill wants to know how do they pick? A lot of people need to know what's up with their rocks. So that is a little myth they do not have a favorite rock. What now? Flim flam busted. What wow okay. So often these rocks are pretty big and they do have

I guess you could call it a pocket but it's just a flap of skin that they can keep praying but these rocks are usually too big to do that so normally what they do is that they come up with a rock in their prey they put the rock on their belly use it as an anvil and break things eat the things and they keep doing that and basically when they're done with the rock they just do a little turn the rock falls down and then they go on with their lives. Wow so they don't they don't really have that favorite rock I mean they might reuse the rock if it's the only rock that's available because they are just right there and just decided to go back down and get more food and that rock happens to be there so they might pick it up again to use it but they're definitely not traveling around with it.

That's hilarious I completely thought like they had a fanny pack and they're like where's my good rock not this rock. What about you know from like a philosophical perspective is that tool use or is it only a tool if you use the rock to smash the clams and not the clams to smash on the rock you know what I mean? Yeah I mean no we call it we still call it as a tool use because it is still you know you're still putting an object onto your you know stomach and then actually using it as a tool essentially to break something open and I'll say that otters can also use other objects as tools so sometimes they'll use another shell to break open their shell they'll use like bottles they'll even use like docks and people's boats like to break things open so they'll use anything.

Now from using tools to being tools I'm sorry. Daniel Schmanuel wants to know about their as long as we're just we're going to go back to them being terrible um are the observations of sea otters assaulting sexually and killing baby seals are those common or is that exaggerated? I don't know how common it is but it definitely is to a point where there's multiple observations of them doing that so the way males territories work is that the dominant males have territories that you know exclude other males from their territories right and in that kind of competition there's always going to be losers and they're excluded from these territories so if they can't have their own territory to mate with females they just get I guess frustrated and find that

little baby seal to do its you know to basically **** it I guess and uh that's usually doesn't end well with the seal. Wow sometimes it doesn't end well even for the otters and according to a hellscape of a study titled patterns of mortality in southern sea otters about 11 percent of dearly departed sea otters spotted by researchers died by mating trauma 11 percent and the violence is not just male to female within same species boy bottles sea otters can also hit below the proverbial anthropomorphized belt line. One thing that's crazy about these male to male conflicts is that when they fight each other they essentially go after each other's baculums which in carnivorens there's a carnivorens have a a bone called a baculum in their penis so they go after each

other's baculum to try to break it so it's pretty brutal out there. How did they learn how to be such assholes are most like North American mammals are most animals this ferocious and we're just surprised because they're pretty adorable. Honestly I have no idea how that compares to other mammals groups and one of the nice things about sea otters is that they have to come to the surface and they just float so it's just so easy to get these observations because they're also really close to shore so like we're able to get these detailed information whereas like other smaller animals like even river otters it's really hard to spot them and actually see what they're doing in the wild in the wild so who knows what they're doing out there. Weird wacky stuff.

You know what's funny is I just looked and Emma Sherwood asked I learned on a high school field trip to the zoo that male otters break each other's dicks to reduce competition is this true? Oh there you go. Emma Sherwood knows what's up. Yeah um Kathleen Sacks wants to know can a troop of dedicated river otters really kill an alligator or a crocodile is that flim flam? So there's these things called giant river otters in South America and the Amazon and these things are a little bit longer than the sea otters and if you ever see pictures of these ones um they're so weird looking they are another older lineage of otters that kind of offshoot from other otters like 10 million years ago or so but they got really like buggy eyes and they got their their face is just like

like an alien otter but these guys are huge and they actually are in family units and they will actually go after sometimes go after like caimans um and there are even reports of them like fighting off jaguars. No. Which is pretty crazy. For more on this join the 4.2 million other humans who have watched a youtube video titled giant otter bite jaguar head seriously injured for daring to attack its comrades uploaded by user wildlife today and this and the other like 14 videos I subsequently watched taught me that a brawl with giant river otters sounds a lot like the worst game of Marco Polo. Why? Well according to the paper airborne vocal communication in adult neotropical otters these creatures have like a menu of sounds they make to chit chat from a ha that's like their own

personal siren to infant babbling and something called a hum gradation that means yo bear left go left we're going left to direct the group and yes some otters have more friends than us but let's try to forget that fact. I mean but yeah the advantage for those guys is that they are in a group setting so they have kind of each other's back to try to you know fight off predators that might try to attack their young. Dang I do not want to be on the wrong side of an otter vendetta ever. I will have my vengeance. You know what let's try to steer this toward the positives again okay life is such a bummer it's such a bummer but it's imperative we find the good and we grasp it and we clutch at it like a buoy in the cold roiling sea and we hug the buoy

hug the good. What about playfulness and cuteness? Anna Thompson, Mori Peltow, Nicole Kleinman, Michelle Tang, Becky the sassy seagrass scientist, Pierce Franklin. They all want to know how cute does it get. Pierce wants to know what's the cutest thing you've ever seen an otter do. The cutest thing I've ever seen is probably just like the little baby sea otter pup that's just floating by itself waiting for its mom. I mean I know I told you about how it's just waiting for mom to bring up dinner essentially but before that it's just floating by itself like a little cork closed eyes all fluffy and like just look at me I'm so adorable like it's got like 10 photographers just around like along the coast or coast trying to take up its picture including me

like it's adorable probably the most playful time I've seen otters are actually river otters they actually play so like they will swim next to each other or like go up and down or just run all over the place so I've seen that in river otters but I've never really seen that sea otters. Ronan Taylor, Ann and Kate Timbs all want to know why do they love ice so much in Kate's words and Ronan wants to know do they get cold? Ronan says we have otters in our local river in Scotland and it's magical when you see them but oh boy it gets so chilly how do they stay cold in an icy river? Yeah so sea otters have the densest fur I think of all mammals so basically sea otters have no fat on them whatsoever so they're really relying on that dense fur and it does keep them

warm super warm so that's why they're able to tolerate living in all these freezing frigid environments just fine and I would imagine river otters also have similarly dense fur so that's why they're able to live in like Scotland and all these other cold places and play in the snow. That's right sea otters unlike most marine mammals do not have layers of blubber this was news to me and this is also why their fur is so soft up to illustrious 165,000 hairs per square centimeter Eurasian river otters about 70,000 hairs per square centimeter what about us a species that has fewer friends than otters well we only have 124 to 200 hairs per square centimeter. Talking about the business end of one Francesca Huggins, Miranda Panda, Claire Johnson and Spex

Owl all would love to talk about their poop and several people wanted to know what they smell like Francesca asked I heard that otter poop smells like violets what in the otter shit is this true why Claire says that they went to the zoo and the guide said that otter poop is noteworthy but then said nothing else so what is noteworthy about otter poop? I definitely have never heard otter poop being described as violets I have never smelled I've never smelled otter poop but I would imagine it smells like the worst shit you could ever smell because they're eating seafood like raw seafood and that doesn't smell good so I don't think I ever want to smell it but I've never smelled it but I would imagine it's probably the worst thing

you could smell right that's what I would think also uh you know we had a scatologist on who uh works at the Chicago Zoo and just has like 13 freezers full of different zoo animal shit so I may have to ask her but first I asked the internet about the smell of an otter turd which is known scientifically as a spraint and it can be accompanied by a musky glup known as anal jelly and Ian Kraft of the website Total Ecology writes when fresh spraint emits a distinct sweet odor that is not at all unpleasant and our friend Tyus Williams aka Science with Tyus on Twitter said it's similar to the odorously pungent waft of dog poop but laced with the fishiness of their marine diet and Dr. Danny Raviotti author of the best-selling book does it fart told me it's

acrid and fishy quote like a tin of anchovies and oil were left in the sun for four days and then a bunch of musky man perfume was sprayed on top of it I also saw that twitter user Forrester Sahida described the smell as similar to jasmine tea others said herrings in an ashtray freshly mown hay lavender but no one's first-hand account topped that of Jim Manthorpe who penned the BBC op-ed quote the delicious scent of otter poo which contains this journey of a paragraph otter spraint is one of the least offensive smells in the world of excrement it has a slightly fishy pungent odor it is a delight whenever I see it I plant my knees in the grass lean over and draw its delicious smell into my lungs okay Jim I needed fact though not

opinion so I reached out to scatology guest Rachel Santamore aka Dr. Poo and she responded with alacrity bless her writing me quote otters live in and around water so they eat fish among other aquatic and non aquatic species so otter poo can be quite smelly after reading the delicious scent of otter poo she writes it seems to me that otter poo reminds the author of the sea think about when you go to the ocean and it smells a little fishy and salty it smells like the ocean a place where you want to be a place that reminds you of summer vacation sand castles body surfing being with your family and relaxing she writes she continues so even though otter poo is smelly it reminds the author of something they like and where they want to be so y'all as long as it doesn't hurt anyone

find your joy cup bangs text your crush sniff on a spraint now what do you do if you would like to use different holes in your face to experience an otter any tips on seeing them rather than sniffing well patrons Kate Alward Shayla Zink Kelly Salmon Wheeze Witch and Miranda Panda all desperately wanted otter spotter tips what about some of the fieldwork that you have gotten to do and there are several folks and I'll list them in a side who want to know if you have any tips for spotting them in the wild do you get to get out there with like you know fleece and down vests and binoculars and get out there to look for them yeah so I've done that a couple times I was primarily trying to film their tool using behavior so we could try to quantify the kinematics behind it so I mean I call

it's not really I mean I guess you could technically call it fieldwork but it's basically you go to the beach and you just have a little camping chair set up the camera and just hang out there until you see an otter that's close enough to start filming or take photos of it and like it's California so it's like what a nice 70 degree sunny day can't complain yeah so it's not yeah yeah it's obviously very rough fieldwork yeah that sounds absolutely terrible I hope you don't have like a sandwich or anything or a nice cold beverage like that's awful no I usually I usually go with the chocolate croissant that sounds like the best thing ever um Becky the sea grass scientist again you know Becky wants to know is a group of otters really called a frolic and if not can you make

that official is that real are they called a frolic I've never heard of that but I like it it makes sense okay well then good it's called that now yeah just if we all just start using that it'll eventually catch on I think yeah it's hereby known as a frolic horrible news again I'm so sorry we jumped the gun here it's already got a name and it's not a frolic a group of otters is called a romp on land in the water it's called a raft and I searched for literally hours nowhere in the literature could I find any mention of them being called a frolic romp goes back to the 1400s when there was a tome called the book of st albin's and it listed plural nouns for different animals including let's just do it let's list a couple an embarrassment of pandas

parcel of possums a conspiracy of lemurs a committee of mongooses a thunder of hippopotamia and many others including a grumble of pugs perhaps grouchy from having a vertebra stroll in but nature writer nicholas lund has gone on record and reported no these terms are not widely used scientifically no matter how old they are but romp is legit it's established if you were to visit the wikipedia page list of animal names I'm telling you right now the lead image they have on the page is of a sea otter so romp it is sorry babies amelia frank wants to know I always hear on nature shows about how vital it is that otter moms keep their babies dry but then like they hold them on their bellies and there is inevitably some flipper or tail dropping the water so do they have to keep them

100% dry because that sounds anxiety provoking amelia says should they not get soaked can you get a can you get one wet or is it like a gremlin no they they're definitely waterproof they can get wet the reason why the mom is trying to dry it out it's just to conserve heat it's also cleaning the fur so otter spend like a third of their life just cleaning grooming just to make because they rely on that fur as that insulation they have to make sure that it's clean from all that dirt or debris or whatever to make sure it's actually functioning so that fur doesn't clump up and it exposes its skin to to the cold environment so they really really want to get those pups nice and clean and usually it also happens to dry them out okay all right so it's not it's definitely not

like if a drop of water gets on this it's you're screwed forever right okay oh no yeah sea otters sea otters are born to be in the water so uh Courtney K wants to know if river otters actually have a communal toilet do they have like mittens i think so but don't quote me on that what what uh river otters do a lot though is that they'll mark territories so they'll basically leave scent marks all over the place and they might go to the same location all the time just to make sure that that's you know the boundary of their territory so maybe that is related to that the otter parties side note are called latrines and they are considered to be hangout destinations where dude otters catch up and exchange information kind of like walking on to the set of cheers but

instead of brusky's it's poo it's pooskies also speaking of chilling i feel like this is an appropriate place to inform you that an otter's den is also called a couch you know what let's talk teeth patrons jesse b jesse hurlbert and even had questions um a few people wanted to know about their teeth uh anna zimmer says i recently heard an otter chewing i was tens of feet away across the water and could barely believe my ears tell me about their chompers so otters uh at least sea otter teeth look very similar to ours they're at least their molars it's nice and big and flat perfect just a crunch thing so often if you go to where sea otters are and you're really quiet you can actually hear them crunching on that hard shell and it's actually pretty amazing and what's super

cool about those uh the sea otter adaptations that is that they're enamel on their molars are actually fracture resistant so they've evolved to basically be able to sustain all of that all that fracture forces from the prey they're eating because if you imagine if you were trying to eat through clam shells your teeth would get destroyed oh you'd be so fast yeah your dentist would be like thank you what makes it fracture resistant do they have a ton of people in like DARPA trying to figure out otter teeth so they can make better weapons or something yeah so i don't know about that but there are definitely people that have looked at the material properties of those teeth and i don't remember exactly what the kind of minerals they have but um they've done comparisons

with like ancient humans that had much bigger jaws and bigger molars to crush those types of seeds as well and it's very similar uh morphologies and it's pretty pretty impressive so it's like kind of through convergent evolution that this type of molars have have evolved to be a perfect teeth to crush things mm-hmm for more on this you can see the 2009 paper enthusiastically titled the remarkable resilience of teeth which straight up compares the strength of a human molar to a sea otters and humans maximum load 87 pounds of bite force for otters over 100 more than a cheetah almost as much as a wolf but how do sea otter molars not split while they're chopping on clam shells oh they do they do split but this paper said that their molars and ours crack all

the time in micro fissures and then proteins rush in to spackle them but still don't eat rocks on the topic of hardness what about the hardest thing about your job the hardest thing about being an otterologist there's gotta be some of this um but there's just so many things to learn about them there's not enough time um so like we know so much about sea otters oh relatively just because they're easy easier to study but in terms of the other otters especially the ones that are like in asia or south america those ones are very are much harder to study just because they're locations and because their population sizes are either shrinking or we have no idea there's actually another otter species down in south america called the marine otter

and it looks like a river otter but it actually lives in a marine environment too and it actually eats a lot of hardshell prey too but we have barely any idea like what exactly it's doing what its population sizes is but it might not be doing well just because there's not a lot of work done on them and just in these remote locations um what do you love the most about them what do you just fall in love with when it comes to doing this work uh it's just there's just such interesting animals um the fact that they have this integration between their tool using behavior their morphology is just unique compared to other things like it's just interesting that they are able to gain access to these harder prey one thing i didn't touch on is that in monorai bay these otters actually exhibit

dietary specialization so some otters will only eat urchins others will only only eat clams others will only eat crabs and so on so part of my research now is actually trying to investigate why that is or how they're actually able to eat these different types of prey so how is it relating to the tool using behavior and how is it relating back to their variation in their biting ability so as in are some otters just able to generate larger bite forces than other otters so that's type of questions that we're hoping to be able to answer soon is that regional like little pockets or is it completely individual like one sister might be eating urchins while a brother's eating clams yeah so right now that's i think primarily found just in california and it goes back to

that carrying capacity so because they're that population is limited in terms of resources and and food instead of each individual being a journalist basically everything they can get they just become super specialized and um just become really good at eating a particular prey so one individual just become a really good urchin specialist and with an urchin specialist there's a certain way you have to extract them certain way you have to like open them and eat them versus like an abalone specialist which uses completely different behaviors in order to get the abalone and and eat it so they just become these really highly specialized individuals that really are able to get access to these different prey items and do it so well that and efficiently

and that's just the way that they can increase that caloric income versus just becoming just a journalist and eat everything they see yeah that's so funny it's absolutely me eating scrambled eggs for dinner like it's fine yeah i mean yeah once you once you know how to do it just go for it right why learn something new yeah i love the idea of someone peeking through my windows being like make a note she's having she's having scrambled eggs for dinner too well that's the thing with these otters that you know they're they're they're flipper tags so people can actually ID them and usually the monitor bay aquarium has lots of volunteers that go out to observe these otters on a daily basis so they're basically if you were out there they would be tracking how many eggs did

you use how did you put any salt did you use a fork how did you cook your eggs so essentially they're basically tracking all of that information so they're tracking how many prey items they're eating what kind of prey items an estimated size of those prey items where they use tools for that prey item it's pretty nuts wow it's pretty amazing data i bet the people who have to organize the volunteer staff at the monitor bay aquarium they must get so many folks who are like if you need a you need a volunteer to watch the otter i'm available i'm available you know like that's gotta be a long list of right i mean who doesn't want to spend a nice nice morning hanging out by the coast and watching some sea otters eat their dinner or eat their breakfast i mean

yeah well meanwhile someone's watching you and being like dr law is having another chocolate croissant we don't know why i mean yeah the otters could totally be just watching me back i hope they are um thank you so so much for being on this is a joy um yeah i i hate otters more than i thought yeah thanks for definitely having me on so ask smart people shameless questions as always and then just sit back and real in horror you can follow dr chris law on twitter at chris underscore j underscore law and you can enjoy otters from a distance you can join them online if you sniff a sprain i'd like to hear about it i i don't know if i do want it actually i do want to hear about i do want to hear about it we're at oligies on twitter and instagram i'm at ali ward with 1l on

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in the feed and at aliword.com slash smologies emily white of the wordery makes our professional transcripts and kaleb patten bleeps episodes those are available for free on our website at aliword.com slash oligies dash extras kelly arduyre makes the website and can make yours nick thorburn made the theme music and editing was done by the quite handsome writer and published poet jared sleeper who just debuted his first ever book it's called 100 poems i'm putting a link in the show notes to it because he has a gorgeous beautiful brain that strings together words so well 100 poems by jared sleeper i'm so thrilled about it i literally could cry um if you listen to the end of the episode you know i tell you secret and this week it's that we fought off covid

so that's good i'm still back in LA for a little bit since my dad was feeling stronger and we were just hovering too much um in the last few weeks maybe even the most anxiety i maybe have ever felt in my life but we're taking it day by day um i've also taken a pickleball and by that i mean i've played it one time and i liked it it's kind of like outdoor ping pong but on a small tennis court and with a wiffle ball and it makes a very satisfying thwacks out also my dear friend and a recent la transplant colin perry from the thanatology episode has started a northeast la pickleball club so i look forward to relishing my future opponents defeats stay tuned for that okay take care be nice to each other okay i love you bye

you and what are we looking at we're looking at sea otters six of them here they go down to the bottom they get a stone and they go down to the bottom they get a seashell and then they smash the shell with the stone like that it's cool isn't it