Creature Feature: Sea Otter.

Speaking of sea otters...



Yes, yes, let's get it off our chests now: Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) are adorable. They're like koalas, only more or less bound to the ocean. They look like stuffed animals capable of floating on the water.  It is impossible to stay mad at sea otters. Go ahead and try. Oshawott is officially the exception to the rule.

Adorable-ness aside, sea otters, like all mustelids, are carnivores. They feed on ocean-dwelling invertebrates like bivalve molluscs and sea urchins as well as small fish. Sea otters can be found in the northern parts of the Pacific ocean - i.e. California to Japan.  Japan loves them even more than I do, by the way.

Even their boogers are KAWAII.

Sea otters have a number of behaviors that only add to their cuteness. They swim on their backs and rotate while eating. They use rocks to break open hard-shelled mollusks (yes, using tools). Sea otters have got to be among the most maternal mammals out there; otter moms don't let their pups out of their sight, tether them in kelp while they go out hunting, and, if their pup happens to die, they still huggle the corpse for a few days. What? That's the most adorable use of a corpse ever.

No, I have not gone soft. The sea otter was recently brought to my attention for a very special reason in my Environmental Sustainability class. Specifically, the sea otter is a keystone species in many parts of its range. Allow me to explain exactly what that means:

Long story short, a keystone species is a species so unique that absolutely nothing else in its ecosystem does what it does. That means, if something happens to that keystone species, the whole food web will go out of whack. Guess what happened when the sea otter was nearly hunted to extinction for its plush fur?

OHMYGAAAWD!

Answer: Total ecological chaos. In the sea otter's natural habitat off the coast of California, it was the only thing eating sea urchins. Sea urchins, as I briefly touched upon yesterday, eat kelp - a sophisticated alga (not a plant) at the bottom of the ocean food chain. If the bottom of a food chain/web is effectively removed, everything that centered its life around it is bound to suffer.  Killing the sea otters meant major fish losses for everybody else.

Now, we have become smarter. The sea otter is now listed as an endangered species. It is illegal to hunt sea otters for their fur. It helps that they're so darn cute that they are hard for anyone with a soul to hunt. The problem is slowly being fixed, but not as quickly as we would like. After all, who would mind more sea otters?

Best case scenario!

Mind, the sea otter happens to be a very cute textbook example of a keystone species. There are several other important species out there that require attention and are not nearly as cute.

Creature Feature: Honey Badger.

Companies love naming soft drinks after swift, powerful animals, or at least using them as mascots: there's one with a cheetah on the can; I've already said my peace about Red Bull; Venom uses several vipers and elapids instead of flavor names; even Monster has started to use a neat-looking eagle for its imported flavors. There is, however, one animal that they have forgotten:

Cute!

Meet the African Honey Badger, AKA the ratel or Mellivora capensis. Like real badgers, it is a mustelid, and is native to much of Africa, Saudi Arabia, and a good portion of India. Don't let the innocent-sounding name fool you. It is badass 24/7.

For starters, the ratel gets its cutesier other name from a single feeding habit: It breaks into beehives.  It is after honey and the gooey protein sacs called African honey bee larvae that are hidden deep inside the hive. Those claws tear easily through the underground hive, and even with the bees agitated, the ratel's thick hide cannot be stung. Period.


That cute just went out the window.

Being impervious to bee stings is one thing, but these are African bees. These are the bees that make Africanized honey bees (the hybrid between African and European honey bees) super-aggressive. With the ratel around, they really have to be. The ratel probably helped make them as mean as they are today.

Besides being more notorious for messing with bees than Winnie the Pooh, the ratel is a vicious predator.  The ratel will eat just about anything it can catch. Some of the most popular ratel catches are cobras and other venomous snakes (geez, nature film writers love dragon-slaying just as much as storytellers do). This mammal is not 100% immune to snake venom, but...



...two hours after being bitten by a puff adder, that ratel is just fine. It drank a little too much and recovered from its hangover. Time for another round! Mongooses properly eat cobras, too, but they are no match for the ratel; the ratel is practically a thrill-killer of snakes. Guinness called it the most fearless animal alive for a reason.

It gets worse: humans are supposed to be the most dominant species in the world, right? Well, this badger disagrees; spears and other human weapons have just as much trouble penetrating this badger's thick hide as bee stings do. Dogs do not do anything to ratels; their skin is too thick and too loose to be torn off. If a ratel gets into someone's chicken coop, those chickens are screwed. Period.


This thing eats snakes for breakfast. What chance do you have?

If Chuck Norris was an animal, he would totally be a ratel. No questions asked. That is just how invincible this creature is.

Tomorrow: Now I have to do a mushroom, don't I? 

Creature Feature: Spotted Skunk.

Skunks have as much uniqueness to them as any other animal. Spanning four genrera, they do not all have the same stripes, which cannot be said of animals such as cheetahs and zebras. There are many different sorts of skunk out there.  Honestly, just because the Looney Tunes say that a skunk can fall in love with a cat that just so happened to be painted with a skunklike stripe does not make it so. The two carnivores are too far apart to ever belong together like Pepe Le Pew so desires.


Mais, qu'est-ce que c'est?

The spotted skunk (genus Spilogale) would like a word with Warner Brothers. The four species of spotted skunks live in much of North America (minus the Great Lakes area -bummer) and some of Central America. They are omnivores, eating anything from berries to small animals. Yes, you can probably have one as a pet; check your local laws.

Unlike 'normal' skunks (y'know, in whatever way an animal that reeks so much can be considered 'normal'), spotted skunks have swirls of white streaked onto their black fur. The spotted skunks are smaller and faster than their striped relatives. They also sport silkier pelts and have been bred for the fur trade for over 100 years.

The spotted skunks should be submitting a letter of outrage to Warner Brothers any time now. Not only do they look considerably more weasel-like than other skunks, they are also frequently misidentified; their pelts used to be sold as "marten pelts," and the skunks themselves can be mistakenly called "civet cats." The two species are unrelated. Civet cats are vivverids and skunks are mustelids, the branch of carnvorids that includes weasels. Get it right, WB; the spotted skunks will leave you alone if you give them a ferret.



Plus, these skunks are far too badass to accept anything less. How many animals have you seen doing handstands lately?