Posted by surprisetalk 4 days ago
Cool to hear it's the result of government effort.
BTW, I remember a fatal accident at Brasilia’s zoo with them when I was a kid.
The first sign isn’t the otter itself. It’s the ripple – small, nearly invisible – spreading across the marsh.
Their return isn’t just welcome. It’s a sign the lakes themselves are healing.
The lake seems unchanged – yet it isn’t
The living world is not just an escape from humanity’s problems – it is the answer to them.
Humboldt State supports an active citizen science project to observe and document river otter populations in the ~watershed of Humboldt Bay in Northern California. It's a cool model for engaging with the community to help protecting its natural resources. I could easily imagine similar resources in other regions. * https://hsu.reclaim.hosting/NorthCoastOtters/
Some context:
https://www.opb.org/article/2024/07/03/sea-otters-spotted-of...
Sadly the sea otter populations were decimated by Russian and later American hunters in the 19th century and never really recovered. My understanding (limited to California) is that the southern sea otter was thought to be extinct until they found a population in Big Sur. They have since been slowly trying to expand its range north, but 80 years on and they have not gone much farther than the Northern end of the Monterrey bay. I suspect that with enough time and patience the Sea Otter will slowly be reintroduced along the entire coast, but it will take a while.
If not friend, why friend shaped?
There are also some YouTube channels that share the days of some otters in captivity, not sure about how I feel about that.
Within a couple of years they had completely wiped out the local moorhen population.
Nature is complicated