A sea otter watches as a tour boat from Seward slowly passes by on Resurrection Bay, Alaska.
Image: Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News.
The weather has triggered a sad situation on the Alaskan peninsula. An extra-cold winter has forced sea otters to leave the sea at Resurrection Bay and go onto the frozen tundra near Port Heiden in search of food. Some of the starving animals have crawled or belly-slid several miles inland. Others have been attacked by wolves, by dogs near houses, killed by villagers for their hides, or have died on sea ice where eagles and foxes eat their bodies.
No one knows how many sea otters have come ashore in the unusual exodus, said Mark Kosbruk, village fire chief. Natives have skinned at least 17 to make hats, gloves and blankets from the luxurious pelts. The villages have clubbed some otters with 2-by-4s or axe handles, shot others and collected a couple of frozen carcasses, he said. Several rotted before they could be gathered or died on the sea ice where people won't travel.
"When it first froze over, they were everywhere," said Kosbruk, who is teaching younger hunters how to skin and salt the hides for tanning.
The sea otters are probably on land looking for water where they might find food, said Douglas Burn, head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska sea otter program. They usually scour sea bottoms for clams or sea urchins, but the ice froze them out.
Similar die-offs have been documented before, but biologists are worried and keeping an eye on the situation, he said.
Western Alaska sea otters from the Aleutian Islands to Cook Inlet are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. They number 48,000, a drop of more than 50 percent in the last 20 years, the agency estimates.
Some scientists blame increased predation by killer whales and a bacteria that causes heart lesions. [story]
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The relationship between global warming and weather extremes, such as the cold snap that caused the bay to freeze over, is not well-understood, as far as I know. So I don't think this post should be in the 'Global Warming' category.
Stories like this, and the current cold snap in the US, show what a misnomer "Global Warming" is. The ultimate effect of all that's going on is, on average, warmer global temperatures. But depending on how the climate changes, that doesn't mean eternal summers everywhere. For example, if the Gulf Stream weakens and disappears, Northern Europe plunges into the cold weather it should have based on it's latitude.
But people see colder temperatures and think Global Warming is a bunch of hooey. And that's the problem. Scientists and sensible folk who realize what is going on have to stop talking about Global Warming and start talking about drastic, possibly catastrophic, Climate Change. Most models predict severely unstable weather as we change our global climate. Once people realize that it doesn't mean long hot perpetual summer, but all sorts of goofy weather, maybe we can get people to take it seriously.