Alaskan Sea Otter Study

In 2008 a professor from Texas A&M University at Galveston invited some classroom teachers to join him and some of his graduate students on their annual summer research expedition to study sea otters in Simpson bay, Alaska. I applied for the trip, and was very excited to be one of the six teachers chosen.

The Simpson Bay otters had disappeared following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, but by 2008 had returned to what scientists assumed to be pre-spill numbers. The otters were part of a very simple food chain (they ate shellfish, which ate plankton) that made it easy to track the flow of food energy in their ecosystem. While there were sharks, orcas, and eagles about that would theoretically love to make a meal out of a sea otter, the researchers had yet to witness a single "mortality event" with the otters and thus treated them as top-level carnivores.

The male otters establish a territory and mate with many females, who will then have sole responsibility for raising the single pup that would be born. The work that we would be involved with centered around counting the number of otters in the area and monitoring their behavior (especially the mother-pup pairs) over a thirty minute time span to see how they were spending their energy.

We worked out of Alice Cove Research Station, which consisted of three heavy-duty tents set up in a shoreside clearing in the Alaskan wilderness about 30 miles from the small fishing town of Cordova. In addition to the tents, the main feature of the campsite was a medium-sized one-room cabin, with a kitchen area, a walled-off shower, and an RV-style toilet. Water faucets were fed from a nearby stream, with an on-demand system to heat water as needed. There was a sofa and large table that could be pulled away from the wall to seat around eight. An electric generator could be fired up whenever electricity was needed. This was where the researchers prepared and ate meals, worked on their papers, relaxed, and hid from the rain and the cold.

We worked from two small boats that we took out into the bay once or twice a day. The first order of business was a census, to determine how many otters were in Simpson Bay at that time. The otter sightings were recorded as either "mother and pup", or as "single" (which would mean a male or a female without a pup- difficult to differentiate from the boat). The census was a tricky thing to do accurately, since the otters would dive underwater when feeding (making them easy to overlook), and they would swim from location to location (making it difficult to keep track of which ones were counted and which ones weren't).

When the census was complete we looked for a mother-and-pup pair that didn't seem to be disturbed too much by our presence. From a respectful distance we then began a thirty minute observational period, recording what the two of them were doing at sixty-second intervals. Observed activities included feeding, resting, grooming, and interacting with other otters. If feeding dives were observed, we kept track of how long they were underwater and used an on-board depth finder to determine how far down the bottom was. Using that information, the researchers would later be able to make inferences about how much difficulty the otters had finding food on an average dive. We also took note of weather conditions and geographical coordinates during the observation, and at the end of the half-hour we'd try to take a photo of the mother (if she'd let us get close enough) to compare to a library of images for possible identification later of the exact individual.

We observed lots of other wildlife besides otters, of course, to include seals, eagles, bears, and Orcas.

The scenery was amazing and the science was fascinating. An incredible trip!