Science Friday - Sea Otters, Alaskan Minerals, Salmon Restoration. Aug 25, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Countries Seek To Return To The MoonOn Wednesday, the Indian space agency ISRO celebrated as its Chandrayaan-3 craft successfully made a soft landing at the lunar south pole. This is the first mission to explore the region around the moon’s southern pole, and a major success for ISRO. The mission plans to use a robotic rover to conduct a series of experiments over the course of about 2 weeks, largely centered around the availability of water and oxygen-containing materials.Less than a week earlier, a Russian craft, Luna-25, crashed onto the moon. It would have been Russia’s first moon landing in 47 years. The cause of the crash is not yet known. Maggie Koerth, science journalist and editorial lead for CarbonPlan, joins guest host Flora Lichtman to talk about the two lunar missions and whether the flurry of activity signals a new space race.They’ll also discuss other stories from the week in science, including a new analysis of the Y chromosome,  work on the camouflage skin of the hogfish, and a setback in a mission to clear up space junk. What’s The Human Cost Of Alaska’s Mineral Boom?A dusting of snow clings to the highway as Barbara Schuhmann drives around a hairpin curve near her home in Fairbanks, Alaska. She slows for a patch of ice, explaining that the steep turn is just one of many concerns she has about a looming project that could radically transform Alaskan mining as the state begins looking beyond oil.Roughly 250 miles to the southeast, plans are developing to dig an open-pit gold mine called Manh Choh, or “big lake” in Upper Tanana Athabascan. Kinross Alaska, the majority owner and operator, will haul the rock on the Alaska Highway and other roads to a processing mill just north of Fairbanks. The route follows the Tanana River across Alaska’s interior, where spruce-covered foothills knuckle below the stark peaks of the Alaska Range. Snowmelt feeds the creeks that form a mosaic of muskeg in nearby Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge, a migration corridor for hundreds of bird species.To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com. Salmon Flourish After Mine Damage Restored In AlaskaOn Friday, July 28, there were hundreds of juvenile salmon clustered in a pool, in clear water surrounded by a bank of fresh woody debris. Not 100 yards away, a spinning drum processed sediment to extract gold.This land is managed by a mining company, but it’s also the site of a major stream restoration project. Thousands of salmon are returning to this stream in Hope, more than 100 years after aggressive gold mining affected the path of the river. The project to restore Resurrection Creek has brought together a coalition of stakeholders, including the present-day mining company that occupies the site.The restoration of Resurrection Creek began in the early 2000s. The goal was to correct habitat damage caused by historic mining.More than 100 years ago, heavy mining activity in the gold rush town affected the stream pattern, turning it from a meandering creek to a straight ditch. Jim Roberts is vice president of Hope Mining Company, and he said hydraulic mining in the early 1900s fundamentally changed the waterway.To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com. All About Sea OttersLast month, a rowdy sea otter was stealing surfboards off the coast of Santa Cruz California, biting chunks out of surfboards, and even catching a few waves. It’s rare for a sea otter to get so close to humans in the wild. Authorities are trying to capture the otter, named 841, for her safety and that of the surfers. But, a month later, she remains at large.  Guest host Flora Lichtman talks with Jessica Fujii, sea otter program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to get the 411 about Otter 841, and talk all things sea otter—including their sophisticated use of tools, carrying food in their armpits, and busting myths about hand holding.  To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lickman, sitting in for Ira Flaydo. Later in the hour, a trip to Alaska to see how gold mining has changed the landscape. And everything you need to know about sea otters. But first, on Wednesday, the Indian Space Agency Isro celebrated as its Chandraian three craft successfully made a soft landing at the Lunar South Pole. People are applauding. Let us all wait to hear from the Secretary of Space and Chairman Isro Sri S. Somnath. Sir, we have achieved soft landing on the moon. India is on the moon.

The control room cheers always give me chills. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Maggie Kerth. Science journalist and editorial lead for Carbon Plan. Welcome back to Science Friday. Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. So this seems like a big deal for India Space Program. Yeah, so they are the first country now to put an unmanned lander on the moon South Pole. And this is particularly important because it's coming right after Russia failed to do the same thing earlier in the week. That Russian lander that crashed on the moon last weekend was trying to hit the same area.

Aside from being a point of pride, what is the purpose of the mission? Well, so this is kind of interesting. It's part of a growing space race that is really about who has access to water resources on the moon. Like you can kind of imagine this as outer space Chinatown. This is India. It is Russia. It is China. The U.S. is interested. And this is all because back in 2009, people found water on the moon's surface and ice under the surface. And the South Pole appears to have the highest concentrations of that. It's important for scientific reasons. You know, we're talking about water that is ancient, and it could teach us a lot about the solar system and even how oceans on Earth got started.

But what everybody is really getting excited about now is because this is also the main way you would get drinking water and water for industrial purposes in a future lunar settlement. So what happened with Russia's craft earlier in the week? All that is really known right now is that it was supposed to be landing and instead had crashed a day before it was supposed to be landing on the surface, I believe. It's not really clear exactly what happened that made it crash. One of the things I think is really interesting here is that this isn't a like put up a flag

and now it's yours kind of situation. Nobody can actually own the moon thanks to a bunch of international treaties. But there's nothing that's stopping commercial water mining. And so you have these countries, and in particular the private companies that a lot of countries are increasingly outsourcing space stuff too, they see that as a crucial resource and as a kind of way into a new business far in the future. It's almost like a lunar land grab. A little bit, yeah, yeah, except you can't actually grab the land. You can only grab the resources. Moving on from the moon, some genetics news. The Y chromosome has been fully mapped? Yeah, so scientists finished the final step in sequencing the entire human genome, and that is thanks to a pair of studies that together sequence Y chromosomes from dozens of men.

For a really long time, everybody thought of the Y chromosome as sort of this junk space, an X chromosome that had already shrunk by half and was just going to keep withering away. there's tons of weird repeats, there's these inversions of sequences, it's just this mess, and it made it really hard to sequence. So what are we learning from these new studies? So these two papers, one of them sequenced the Y chromosome of one European man whose whole genome has now been sequenced, and the second study sequenced just the Y chromosomes of dozens of men from all over the planet. And one thing that taken together, these studies make clear, is that the apparent mess of the Y chromosome. It isn't just nonsense chaos. So these Y chromosomes varied widely between men. For example, you had like one guy with 23 copies of a specific gene while another man had 39,

but they also found that the repetition isn't totally random. There's patterns to it. And what's more, the genes are conserved because of this repetition in a way that suggests the Y chromosome isn't actually disappearing at all. And it's still going to take a while to figure out what practical knowledge can come from this. But in the meantime, we know more about this thing than we ever did before. And it seems to be a lot more interesting than we maybe thought. In other biology news, research into the camouflaging skin cells of the hogfish. Tell me about this. Yeah. So I love this. So this study started because a scientist who also loves fish, watched a dead hogfish change color to match the deck of her fishing boat.

Oh, wow. Yeah, like it had one of the stories I was reading said it had like a spearfishing hole right through it. So this was like a very dead fish, not like just partial dead. And it was still able to change color. Yeah. And it turns out after tons of research, what she has found is that these hogfish have a previously unknown kind of cell in their body.

these skin cells that contain light-detecting proteins you normally see in like human retinas. Wow. So it's almost like the skin is a system into itself. Like it doesn't need the brain to do this color-changing magic. It seems like it doesn't. So these researchers found that the hogfish has one of these cells for every one of their color-changing cells. and the cells work together to kind of adjust to light levels and adjust to like sort of what's going on around them. And given the fact that the fish can't even see their own skin with their eyes when they're alive, this all suggests that the ability to camouflage

is being driven by the skin itself. And these light and color-changing cells are working on a body-wide system that can fine-tune color and pattern without much input from the brain. Wow, that's so cool. I see an opportunity for a hogfish coat. Like, it's a step before the invisibility cloak, you know?

Oh, my God. The camouflage cloak? I assume that Mr. Burns has one of those in his closet as we speak. In other news, cyber attackers are targeting telescopes. Why? So we don't know. Cyber attackers are hitting these space telescopes. no one's really sure why or what to do about it.

Noir Lab is this National Science Foundation-funded coordinating center for ground-based astronomy. And on August 1st, they announced that a telescope in Hawaii had been targeted by a cyber attack. According to this report in science, that attack has since led the lab to shut down operations at multiple telescopes in both Hawaii and Chile. And in some cases, the observatories can still observe, but they can't be operated remotely. anymore. And so the researchers around the world are like rushing grad students to the scene to operate the telescopes in person. There's all sorts of wild stuff happening. Drama. Yeah. Well, and this really affects research because when you're talking about astronomy, you're talking about research that has to be done in these very specific windows of time. So if you can't point the

telescope where it needs to go at the right time, you're going to lose like a year's worth of work. Staying in space for a moment. So we know that space junk is a problem. Debris left in orbit from launches and croaken satellites. And it sounds like an attempt to clean some of it up has hit a snag. I love explaining this. So a big hunk of rocket that the European Space Agency had planned to remove from Earth orbit as part of this demonstration of how we can remove space junk has instead been hit by space junk.

and now shattered into smaller pieces. And this might sound at first like the space junk is just taking itself out. But I regret to inform that it is actually a cautionary tale about this total trash pile we have floating around the earth. Because now there's just tons of tiny little shards in addition to the big chunk. Yeah, the smaller pieces are actually one of the biggest dangers of space junk. Like sort of imagine you don't want a tree to hit your house in a tornado, but you also really don't want a whole bunch of branches hitting your house all at once either. Right. I guess the small pieces must be also impossible to clean up. They're a lot harder to clean up. So the ESA is now having to reevaluate what's going to happen with this demonstration project and whether they're going to be able to do what they originally set out to do.

And space junk is increasingly a really big deal. When you're talking about just the objects that are bigger than four inches wide, there's more than 36,000 of them out there. And when you start to include everything we can possibly track, which is objects down to just 0.04 inches wide, you're talking about hundreds of millions of things that can crash into satellites and the space station and damage stuff. Wow. Finally, there's that line from the movie Alien that in space no one can hear you scream, but it sounds like that may not actually be true.

Well, with a lot of technological fiddling, scientists have found a way to make sound waves travel through a vacuum, but only for very short distances. So you and the alien and the person you're screaming to kind of have to be like hugging. sound doesn't travel in a vacuum because sound is actually like it's a physical thing. At a very tiny level, sound is a shove. It's the movement of particles as they vibrate and jostle and they eventually bang into the solid surface of your eardrum. And in space, the particles of things like gases and plasma that do exist are so far apart that sound can't really move through them. And thus the xenomorph kills in silence. but scientists published a paper showing that it's possible to get sound to move through a space with no particles.

And the trick is to take these two crystals of zinc oxide, which is a material that produces an electric charge when you have a force applied to it. And given that sound is, again, a physical thing, hitting the crystal with some bars will create this charge that then disrupts the electric fields nearby. And if there are two crystals in the vacuum that share the same electric field, the ripples of that disruption can spread from one crystal to another and be enough to kind of move the sound along. So if I'm traveling through space, I might want to carry a couple crystals if I want my springs to be heard. Well, the catch is that the sound gets worked as it travels most of the time. They had a few where it was 100% replicated, but not much. And what's more, nobody is going to be using this to send messages through the cosmos. It only works on distances about as long as a single sound wave.

Okay. That's about all we have time for. Maggie Kerth is a science journalist and editorial lead for Carbon Plan. She's based in Minneapolis. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks a lot for having me. When we come back, we're heading to Alaska where there's controversy surrounding a proposed gold mine. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. A few weeks ago on Science Friday, we talked about lithium mining in our most eastern state, Maine. Today we're digging into controversy around another mining project, 4,500 miles to the west.

In Interior Alaska, near the border with Yukon, Canada, a mining company, has plans to dig a new open-pit gold mine. They're calling it Mancho, or Big Lake, in the language of the Tetland Tribal Nation that resides there. Some residents are concerned about the mine's plan to use the public highway. Critics also say federal and state agencies fail to properly review the overall environmental impact. And the stakes are high, they say, because this project could set a precedent for other mines, an industry that's growing as the state looks beyond oil. Joining me to talk about this story is my guest. Lois partially, freelance journalist.

She reported this story for Grist in collaboration with Sean McDermott for Alaska Public Media. Welcome to Science Friday, Lois. Thank you so much for having me. Let's talk about this mine. What is Manchow and what's the status of it? Yeah, maybe it would help to start by describing where it is. Alaska's interior is big, beautiful, and really wild. Right now, its roadsides are splashed with purple.

as fireweed blooms and in a few weeks, birch trees will start turning golden. But of course, winter is a big part of the year. It's spruce and snow country. So this is where Kinross, Alaska, the majority owner and operator of a joint mining venture, have signed a lease from the native village of Tetland. They plan to dig a gold mine called Manchow and then truck the rock on the public highway, roughly 250 miles, to where it will be. be processed at an existing line called Fort Knox near Fairbanks. Why has this mine drawn attention? The trucking plan has raised some eyebrows.

It calls for 60 round trips per day or a truck every 12 minutes. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They will follow a winding two-lane road, which has very few passing lanes or pullouts, and then drive through the heart of Fairbanks, one of Alaska's largest urban areas. It's not even just the mine itself. It's the transporting of the materials. Definitely. These trucks are a lot larger than your average semi-truck. They're 95 feet or roughly the length of two humpback whales and they'll weigh 80 tons. You talk to residents in Alaska about their concerns about Mancho. What are those concerns? What have people's reactions been? Yeah, I've spoken to a number of people who are very concerned, including residents.

like Barbara Schumann who know personally how dangerous the road can be. Her husband's family were killed years ago when a commercial truck hit them head on. And Schumann is a retired lawyer. And when she didn't feel like the state was taking her questions about the project safety seriously, she helped form a community group called Advocates for Safe Alaska Highways. And they have been working to raise questions with the state about the potential safety risks. I don't know if you know that road. It's the only road people in Tetlin and Toc and all those little communities down the Richardson and Alaska highways.

That's the only connection they've got to hospitals and airports. Are there environmental concerns as well? Definitely. The risks that people are worried about go beyond traffic. The mine and its tailings have the potential to generate acid for thousands. of years. Basically, when sulfide gets exposed to air, it oxidizes, and when it gets wet, it turns to sulfuric acid, which can be really damaging to the environment. And this could be a problem not only at Mancho, but also in what's known as fugitive dust, or the stuff that blows out of the trucks on the

road, or gets kicked up while processing, stockpiling, or storing the tailings at Fort Knox. And there are also concerns about mercury, arsenic, and other heavy metals, contaminating salmon streams and other waterways. What does Kinross, the mining company, say to those concerns? Kinross, Alaska declined repeated interview requests and told other people not to speak to us. But on their website, they say the project will create more than 400 jobs. So some of the folks you interviewed for this story say that the environmental review, of the mine was insufficient. What are they concerned about? Permitting for this project fell to different state and federal agencies, and no one really looked at the project's full scope. When Fort Knox was

first developed in 1993, the company conducted an assessment that has provided an umbrella for Mancho and several other mines since. And no one really anticipated asset generation back then. The Army Corps of Engineers led the federal review for Mancho, and they told us that even though Moncho's geochemistry is quite different, they didn't consider the potential impact of bringing this different type of war to Fort Knox. Is it unusual to sort of have missing pieces of the environmental review? Well, yes and no. Other federal agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S.

and Wildlife Service both criticized the Army Corps' decision to focus on five acres of wetland that didn't include the trucking corridor or where the processing will take place. Mancho is one of the only hard rock mines in Alaska that hasn't had an environmental impact statement. But the strategy of intentionally dividing projects up like this, so you can say each facet doesn't have a significant impact, is actually pretty common. It's called segmentation of permitting. And law professors at Lewis and Clark just published an analysis, finding the Army Corps has a long history of this kind of narrow segmentation. They argue that violates the agency's responsibilities under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The mine will be on Tetland Tribal Land. What's the tribe's opinion of this mining project? Tetland is in a unique position. It retained its subsurface rights, so it negotiated this deal directly with Kinross, Alaska. That's unusual in Alaska, because under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, for-profit regional corporations were created, and they typically now control tribal subservice rights. I wasn't able to speak to Tetland's tribal chief or its tribal council. They declined repeated interview requests.

But I did speak to Stanley Taylor, the environmental coordinator, and he told me some residents were concerned about the risks, which is why the tribe supported trucking ore to Fort Knox outsourcing some of the potential hazards. Did you talk to people who are in favor of the project? Yeah. Some tribal members are excited about what the mining royalties could bring to Tetlin. Most people in Tetland don't currently have running water. And some people in the nearby town of Tocke are also excited about the economic benefits the mine can bring. It's a really small town, and one resident, Brank Jorgensen, told me the mine will offer year-round employment, which is currently hard to find. And he also pointed out that our modern lifestyle requires a lot of minerals. And he argued that

if we're going to consume electronics and all of the other things in our lives that require metals, the U.S. should produce them. What might this project mean for mining in the state generally or elsewhere in the state? If Kinross, Alaska is allowed to use public roads now, it will set a precedent for other projects in the state. And that has potential health and safety risks. The trucks will cause millions of dollars in pavement damage every year just to start. And other big projects you may have heard of, like Ambler Road, are also planning on. using Alaska's public highways to transport their ore, which compounds all of the risks.

So just imagine driving along behind a tourist RV on a two-lane highway and having a 95-foot-long mining truck passing you. It's going to really change what being on the roads feel like. What happens next with this project? Mancho really feels like it's just the beginning. There's been a surge of mining in Alaska. recently. And to be clear here, gold itself is not a critical mineral. But Alaska does have large reserves of cobalt, copper, and other rare earth minerals essential to the green energy transition. So questions about the role mining will play in Alaska's economy are growing, and so are questions about its impacts. And nationally, companies are using the promise of rare earth metals

and the clean energy transition as an excuse to fast-track permitting for mining projects like this. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Loest Partially, freelance journalist. She reported this story in collaboration with Grist and Alaska Public Media.

And now we're going to talk about what one area of Alaska is doing to heal its habitat for mining. We're paddling to a stretch of river called Resurrection Creek on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula near Anchorage. More than 100 years ago, miners started digging for gold there.

Giant machines turn the sinuous river into a deep, straight ditch. And the salmon population plunged. But Resurrection Creek is earning its name. Over the last few decades, there's been an effort to restore the habitat for fish. And despite mining still happening in the area, the effort seems to be working. Joining me to talk about this project is my guest, Riley Board, Report for America Fellow at KDLL in K-D-L-L in K-Nai, Alaska. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me.

So what did mining do to the habitat and the salmon that lived there? Sure. So I think first I'll turn to Jim Roberts to explain that. He's the vice president of the modern day mining company that's still based in this area. And he's got a pretty good explainer on that. So a very fast, deep river was great for mining. And the effect of that in this corridor and the reason the forest services here is it took this nice, normally form river. with a lot of sinuosity and turned it into a rain gutter.

In order for salmon to thrive in a river habitat, they need places to stop and rest on their journey up river. And when mining turned this into a really straight, fast river, it made it really difficult for salmon to travel upstream and, you know, made it an unviable habitat for those fish. Okay, so what are people doing to bring the creek back to what it used to be like? What are the actual interventions? Sure. So engineers have been working there on two different phases of the project, one that happened earlier in the 2000s and one that's happening right now.

And those phases are working to re-add those curves to the river that make it, you know, a great place for salmon to live. So they add sort of two important things. One of them is pools for resting. So salmon, as they're swimming upstream, they need places to stop and rest. so they're not expending all of their energy. So they're adding back in these pools where salmon can rest. And then they're also adding bends back in the river. And from what I understand, those bends are important for protecting salmon from their predators like bears.

As they travel up the river, they need places to hide from predators. And so that's what those bends are for. But also there's a lot of other features that involve complex engineering. And all five species of Pacific salmon live in this creek. and they all need different things. And so the engineers took all of those different species into account when they designed new features to add back into this river to make it a good habitat. Resting pools. I feel like this is what I need on even the shortest of runs.

Yeah, absolutely. So is the restoration working? Well, from what I understand, that first phase saw a six-fold return of salmon to the creek. You know, for 100 years, there were very few salmon in this creek as a result of the straight. of the ditch. So that first phase brought back a sixfold return and the current phase that the engineers are working on, you know, it'll take time. They'll need time to study and see what the effects are. But the engineers that I talked to seem very enthusiastic. They saw salmon returning faster than they even expected. And when I was there at the end of July, I saw just pools of

salmon, like piles of salmon. Yeah, you couldn't even see the bottom of the creek through the absolute thicket of salmon. So on on pure eyewitness account, there's definitely been a return of fish to that creek. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I mean, you reported that a mining company that still operates in this stretch of river is actually involved in the restoration. What's in it for them? Yeah. So, you know, from what I understand from talking to folks at that mining company and folks with the Forest Service, that relationship started off hospital. style when, you know, they first wanted to do a restoration project here because there are active mining claims through this corridor of the river. But eventually, everyone came to the table,

they started negotiating, realized that they weren't, I believe I'm quoting here, warring nations and came to a mutual agreement and a sort of turning point happened in their relationship when the Forest Service decided that it needed to build a bridge over the creek. For them, the purpose of that bridge was so that contractors could traverse the river when they were doing their restoration work. But that bridge was also helpful for the mining company because previously they were just driving through the river to get from side to side. And so the Forest Service said you can use this bridge too. This will work for miners. And so they came to this, you know, infrastructure compromise. And I think the relationship just improved from there. A bridge. That's what was in it for them.

Yeah, literally. Is mining still happening in this area? Like on this stretch. of the creek. Yeah. So when I visited earlier this summer, mining was still happening, although it was sort of wrapping up with the season. But in the future, once this restoration project is complete, mining will be allowed to continue. But miners will have to meet extremely high standards when it comes to doing their work and then returning the area to its previous status. If mining's going to continue on this river, what does it actually look like? Are they digging the river into a rain gutter again and then bringing it back or what's the deal? Yeah, so mining today is much more sophisticated and the equipment is really different from what happened there 100 years ago. And so the miners are basically using the stream to clean their material and sort their material to find gold among the sediment.

This isn't exactly like an open pit mine where they're displacing a ton of earth. So they'll just be using the running water from the stream to clean the material and then resetting that area to. resetting that area to the standards of the Forest Service. Got it. How is this restoration affecting other wildlife or what's the hope? Yeah. So animals that eat salmon, like bears, obviously benefit from the return of salmon to this creek. And actually, when I got to visit in late July, everyone was raving about seeing a juvenile bear that had come to the creek to fish just the day before, which as far as I know just wasn't happening before. And then also part of this project is the revegetation of this stream corridor.

That's sort of what will happen after the engineering of the creek is complete. They're, you know, re-vegetating it to look like it's pre-mining conditions, which, you know, will bring back obviously the vegetation, but also things like moose and other animals that thrive in that environment. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Riley Board Report for America Fellow at KDLLL and Kinae, Alaska. Thanks for joining us. Of course, thanks for having me.

We have to take a break, but when we come back, diving into the science of sea otters, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Last month, there was a viral animal story I cannot stop thinking about. A rogue sea otter was stealing surfboards off the coast of Santa Cruz, California. Biting chunks out of boards and even catching a few waves. A five-year-old female who's been stalking surfers in this area for months. The culprit's name, Otter 841.

She remains at large. Up next, the 4-1-1 on Otter 841. Who is she? And why is she taunting surfers? Plus a deep dive into all things Otter. Do they actually crack shells with rocks? Do they really hold hands? Here to separate otter fact from fiction is my guest.

Jessica Fuji, sea otter program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium based in Monterey, California. Jessica, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Okay, so let's start with 841. Who is this surfboard stealing otter? Do we know anything about her? So this particular otter has a little bit unique history. Her mom was actually one of these pups that had been orphaned and needed to be rescued and cared for.

So she went through what we call our surrogacy program where we pair orphan seawater pups with our resident adult female seawters. Wow. And we're doing this so that they are forming that mother pup bond and able to provide, you know, teaching those essential skills for survival with minimal human interaction. And that has been really key to our success in being able to have these animals return to the wild. and act like wild otters. So it was 841's mom who was adopted by one of your otters. Is that right? That's exactly right.

And so her mom was successfully released to the wild. And unfortunately, in her case, we know she was illegally fed by people out on the water. And when that happened, that led to her needing to be brought back. It was no longer safe for her to remain in the wild. And when she was in our care, we learned that she was pregnant. And so the idea was to be able to have her give birth in an animal care facility. This was with one of our partners. And then have that pup actually raised by her biological mother.

And that pup ended up being 841 with the intent of 841 still being able to go back into the wild. So in many ways, she actually had less interaction with people than many of our other surrogate-reared otters. But all of those protocols to minimize human interaction were still followed. And so 841, you know, came back to us just prior to being released. So she was able to socialize with other sea otters receiving care. And then, like I mentioned, in 2020, she was successfully released back to the wild. So do you have a theory? what is what is with the surfboard thing? Why is she stealing surfboards? Yeah, this particular

behavior is very unusual and also the level of kind of persistence and aggressiveness that comes along with this is really not something we've seen in quite a while. This is not a typical otter shenanigan is what I'm hearing. No, no, definitely not. This is just unique to her, it sounds like. Yeah. You know, this particular focus on surfboards, particular types of surfboards. Really? Which she has a specific type? Particularly ones that have a softer top are ones that she seems to particularly going after.

We don't know why that is. There's nothing that occurred while she was in care with people that would have led to that. So based on, you know, the few other instances we have seen being fed can lead to these types of associations. And then in some cases, if a female otter is pregnant, when she's going through those hormonal changes, that leads to unusual behaviors. We don't know if either of those are the case with 841 or if there's something else entirely going on. You know, the social media version of this story and like the me version of the story was like, This is hilarious and like you go girl, otter. But what is the otter scientist angle on this story?

Yeah. So from all the members of the different agencies and the aquarium that have been monitoring this otter, we're concerned. And we're concerned about what this could mean for her health. If there is something abnormal going on in her that is causing these behaviors, but as well as concern for safety of the public. Really? I think of otters as so cute. And many people do it. And that is part of the problem. So people don't think of them as wild animals. They think of them as kind of teddy bears because they have so much fur. They have that very charismatic face. But they have, you know, jaws and teeth designed to be able to crush hard-shelled prey that they need to eat. And so if they chose to turn that skill onto, you know, someone's arm or someone's. leg, it could cause significant damage. And they also can have diseases that could be passed on to

people. So that close proximity, that potential for harm, it is something that we don't want to take too lightly. So how do you prevent the otters that you're caring for rehabilitating from getting too comfortable with people? Like, what do you do to make sure that the otters don't see people as, you you know, animals they want to approach. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So a lot of work has gone into this. And the main things that we do are at key points where there could be positive associations. We're doing everything we can to disguise our form. So this is wearing like dark ponchos to disguise, you know, our body, face shields. So they don't see our face. Like a like a Darth Vader mask? What should I picture?

Exactly. That's exactly what we call our disguises is our, is our, Or not big her costume, yeah. Just a wild guess. Amazing. And then we also don't talk while we're around the otters, especially, you know, doing any close proximity grooming of the young pups before they're placed with their surrogate mothers. And so all of that combined really helps keep that distance emotionally, physically between the people who are providing the care and the animals. You're not like, oh, my little cute otter, love you. Like, that's probably not.

Absolutely not. So I want to dive into sea otter science generally. Surfboards aside, I feel like otters are having a little bit of a moment, at least on my Instagram reels. But I want to check some facts with you. So let's start with otter cuisine. What do otters eat, sea otters eat? Yeah, so sea otters eat a wide variety. of prey items, mostly different invertebrate prey items that they can find on the seafloor.

So this can be anything from urchins, avaloni, crab, but also snails, fat-in-keeper worms, clams, just depending on their environment. But we'll also see that depending on the location otters might develop favorites. They'll specialize on a subset of the different prey that are available. and become really good at eating those particular prey items, finding them, getting them open quickly. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing I wanted to ask about getting them open. I mean, it's not trivial to open. Anyone who's tried to shuck an oyster knows that shellfish are not trivial to open. Do otters actually use tools like rocks to do it? How do they do it? Yeah, some of them will definitely use tools and they're really quite skilled at it. So they'll often find a rock on the seafloor and bring it up to the surface. One of the cool things about being able to study sea otters is that they actually bring all their food up to the surface to eat so we can directly watch and observe what they're eating and how they're eating it.

And so if they bring up a rock, they'll often place it on their chest and then they'll hold the food between their paws and smash it up against that rock to break open that shell and then they can get the softer meat that's inside. You know, we hear about crows and monkeys using tools, and I feel like that's like a big deal when an animal uses tools. Yeah, I mean, we're definitely that list of, you know, non-human animals that are and non-human primates that are using tools is growing. But I think it's still a really fascinating area of study to understand, you know, kind of what problems are these animals trying to solve and how are they able to do that? How much shellfish does it take to power an otter? So an otter typically needs to eat about a quarter of their body weight every single day. And that's just for survival. So it takes a lot of food for them to survive.

Why? Why do they need so much food? Yeah. So unlike pinnipeds, so seals or sea lions or whales and dolphins, sea otters don't have blubber to help keep them warm. They rely on their thick fur, but also having a really high metabolic rate. And so to feed that kind of energy that they need to stay warm, that takes a lot of food. Wow. Are they constantly foraging? I feel like this would be a lot of trips to the bottom of the sea if you're picking up one clam at a time.

Yeah. So they, you know, how much they need to spend during a day to get that amount of food can vary. on prey availability. And so it can be anywhere between, you know, 25 to almost 50% of their day that they spend foraging. And then when they're not doing that, they really need to be able to rest in order to conserve the energy that they just gained. Doing that backflow.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do they have any food storage techniques? So they're known to have what is kind of affectionately called their pocket. Their fur is very kind of loose so that they can groom all of it. And that includes kind of this extra portion of skin and fur underneath their armpits. And they're able to use that extra portion of skin to hold food. So often we'll see if an otter comes up from foraging,

they'll have maybe one prey item in their paws. And then they'll roll. And all of a sudden there's a new, you know, clam that they're holding. and they actually pulled that out of that pocket. Out of their armpit pocket. Exactly. Where they store their snacks. Yum.

How many clams can they fit in there? So we've never really measured it, but just from my experience of watching sea otters, we've seen probably an otter with smaller clams have three or four at a time. When it's been smaller snails, like turban snails, I've seen them have up to a dozen. snails at one time that they just keep rolling it and pulling out. Otter pelts were once a big thing,

right? It was part of why otters are almost hunted to extinction. Is their fur special? Yeah. So their fur is the densest fur of any mammal. They can have over a million hairs per square inch. Wow. And so this keeps them very warm. And this was also, as you said, why they were overhunted. for their pelts, you know, in the 17 and 1800s. And then their pups have an even denser coat that makes them more buoyant when they're first born. And it's a great, you know, evolutionary adaption to being in a marine environment. I'm Flora Lickman, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, we're talking about sea otters with Desca Fuji from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Well, yeah, let's talk about the pups. So when they're first born, can they dive and swim and do all the things that an adult otter can do? When a pup is first born, it's incredibly dependent on its mother for everything. So they don't really swim. They definitely cannot dive. So having that coat that is so buoyant allows them to float at the surface, well, you know, mom might need to dive down to grab food. The puck can still just be resting at the surface.

And then slowly as they age, that that, that, coat will shed and they'll get their more adult-like coat. And during that transition, we'll actually see them trying to start to dive, but they're still too buoyant. So they just pop right back up like a little cork. I've heard something that seems like it cannot be true, which is that baby otters get put on kind of a kelp leash by their moms. Is there, is there any truth to that? I don't think we've ever called it a leash, but we will see, you know, moms will either place their Pups in the kelp or maybe even wrap them up a little bit, and that keeps them from drifting off too far. So when a mom needs to forage, you know, she needs to get that 25% of her body weight of

energy plus potentially even more to provide to the pup. She needs to be able to dive down to the surface, come back up, make sure her pup is okay. So having it kind of stay in the same spot can be really helpful for that. So we will see them kind of purposely put their pup in a kelp area to kind of keep them in place. Kelp, nature's playpen. Okay, here's the one I really need you to tell me if it's true. We have to talk about the hand holding thing. This seems like their most adorable trait. I feel like I've seen many videos, even this morning I saw a picture of two otters holding hands. Does this happen? Yeah. So unfortunately, I will have to First, some people's bubble on this, those two otters that you saw are living very happy lives in an aquarium.

And so pretty much every photo and video that we see of this are of those particular otters. So it is something that they do, but in the wild, it's not something that we see adult animals, you know, just holding on to each other. You know, we will see the moms and pops holding on to each other, but beyond that, it's really not something we see. in the wild. We will see them, you know, raft up is what we call a group of otters resting together. So they might be in the same kelp bed together, but they're not actually linking paws in order to stay together. Bursting, bursting everybody's bubble on a Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, yes, but hopefully there's so many other interesting things about sea otters

to learn about that it's not that much letdown. No, I agree. I agree. There's too many other cool facts. Before we let you go, what's the plan with Otter 841? Will she remain at large or people trying to capture her? So we're still monitoring her and working with the state and federal agencies and based on environmental conditions, based on her behavior. They are making assessments on whether or not it is feasible to attempt a capture and whether or not it is still needed. So at this point, she has is still being monitored, and as of today, she is still out in the wild. That's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Jessica Fuji, Sea Otter Program Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium based in Monterey, California. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me.

If you want to see some pictures of sea otters, go to ScienceFriday.com slash otters. Here are some of the people who helped make this show happen. Our digital producer is Emma Gomez. Diana Plasker is our experiences manager. Santiago Flores is our community manager, and Ariel Zitch is our director of audience. B.J. Leaterman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play, Science Friday.

You can email us, too. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. I'm Flora Lichten. Have a great weekend.