In the Field

And These Front Paws Have a Super-sensitive Sense of Touch. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 18, 2024.

Sea Otters crack me up! I find them amongst the cutest of animals at ALL ages - not just when they're young "pups". And if you get lucky enough to encounter one that is calm enough to really watch it...well...they do the funniest (and cutest) things! This one seemed to be particularly keen on showing off its front paws (and even the paws are kinda cute).

As it turns out, Sea Otter paws are a whole lot more than just cute. In fact, they're absolutely essential to their ability to acquire food, and not just for the grabbing of that food. One of the biggest hurdles a Sea Otter has to overcome in its struggle to survive is staying warm in a heat-sucking cold ocean. They meet this challenge partly through having an amazingly thick and insulating fur coat and partly by having a crazy-high heat-generating metabolic rate (basically a furnace turned up to high!). This sky-high metabolic rate means they have to eat a huge amount of food - up to 25% of their body weight per day! And all of it must come from the sea, mostly in the form of shellfish.

So how can Sea Otters ensure that they always get the food they need to sustain their body temperature? Don't forget - they're fully aquatic and to hunt for their food they must dive (sometimes very deep) in water that isn't always clear and easy to see through. This means that relying on their vision to hunt their prey could leave them very hungry (or dead of hypothermia!). So Sea Otters rely on the sense of touch in their front paws to distinguish between nutritious shellfish and rocks on the bottom of the ocean! This sense of touch is extremely highly developed in Sea Otters - the part of the somatosensory cortex in their brain that receives signals from their front paws is disproportionately big compared to any of their relatives in the mustelid (or weasel) family.

How does their sense of touch compare to that of a human hand (which is one of the most touch-sensitive structures in the entire animal kingdom)? Testing has shown they're about equal in discriminating textures, but the Sea Otters make the discrimination about 30 times as fast. This makes a whole lot of sense given a Sea Otter may be 100 feet or more below the water surface and doesn't have a whole lot of time to waste in figuring out what it's touching is a rock or a clam!

So the next time you see a Sea Otter waving its cute little front paws you might want to stop and consider just how amazing those little paws are! I know I will. 😉

Here's a larger version (4800 pixel) of this cute Sea Otter showing off his amazing front paws:

• And These Front Paws Have a Super-sensitive Sense of Touch: Download 4800 pixel image (JPEG: 3.1 MB)

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

1. These images - in all resolutions - are protected by copyright. I'm fine with personal uses of them (including use as desktop backgrounds or screensavers on your own computer), but unauthorized commercial use of the image is prohibited by law. Thanks in advance for respecting my copyright!

2. Like all photographs on this website, these images were captured following the strict ethical guidelines described in The Wildlife FIRST! Principles of Photographer Conduct. As such, no baiting or any form of attractant was used and, as always, we attempted to minimize our impact on the ongoing behaviour of the subjects. I strongly encourage all wildlife photographers to always put the welfare of their subjects above the value of their photographs.

3. This image was captured during my Summer in the Southern Great Bear Exploratory Photo Adventure in late August of 2024. Each year I offer trips into the Great Bear Rainforest as well as tours into the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary (to photograph grizzlies, of course!). Details about these trips can be found on the Photo Tours page of this website.

Behind the Camera

And These Front Paws Have a Super-sensitive Sense of Touch. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 18, 2024.

High Efficiency* Compressed RAW (NEF) format; ISO 800.

Nikon Z9 paired with Z Nikkor 400mm f2.8S @ 560mm (built-in TC engaged). Hand-held from a floating Zodiac inflatable boat. VR on in Sport mode. Single-point AF area mode.

1/400s @ f4.5; -1.0 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.

At the Computer

And These Front Paws Have a Super-sensitive Sense of Touch. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 18, 2024.

Initial noise reduction and capture sharpening on the .nef (raw) file using the DeepPRIME XD2S algorithm of DXO PhotoLab 8.1 Elite (using the appropriate lens/camera optical module).

Subsequent adjustments to the adjusted linear DNG file (exported from PhotoLab) and conversion to 16-bit TIFF file (and JPEG files for web use) - including all global and selective adjustments - made using Phase One's Capture One Pro (build 16.4.6). In the case of this image the only global adjustment was slight tweak to colour saturation. Selective local adjustments performed using Capture One Pro's layers and masking tools. In this case numerous small adjustments and minor tweaks were made on 9 separate layers, with most of the tweaks being associated with "exposure balancing" and contrast adjustments (such as adjustments to clarity, highlights, shadows, etc.).

Photoshop modifications included insertion of the watermark and/or text.

Conservation

And These Front Paws Have a Super-sensitive Sense of Touch. Great Bear Rainforest, British Columbia, Canada. August 18, 2024.

Species Status in Canada*: Special Concern (April 2007) - protected off the North American coast since 1911.

Back in the late 1800's and early 1900's the Sea Otter (Enhydra lutris) was hunted to near extinction along both the Asian and North American Pacific Coasts. The reason? It's luxuriant coat. Otters are unlike any other aquatic mammal in that they don't use fat or blubber to insulate themselves from the chilling effects of the water they are found in. Instead, they rely on their amazingly thick fur coat for insulation. Their amazing coats have a higher density of hair (up to 150,000 strands of hair per square cm!) than any other animal in existence today. To ensure that this coat serves its insulative purpose, otters spend a disproportionately large amount of time grooming their coat (to ensure its natural oils continue to provide an effective waterproof barrier). Unfortunately, the biological functioning of the otters coat can be easily fouled by contamination by oil and other hydrocarbons - thus making them extremely sensitive to the effective of marine oil spills.

Other fascinating aspects of the biology and behaviour of the sea otter include the use of tools (they will use rocks to break apart shellfish such as sea urchins), and the fact that they have an metabolic rate two to three times higher than other mammals of their size. This means they must eat 23% to 33% of their own body weight DAILY, just to to replace the calories burned through maintaining their body temperature in the cold water environment they live in.

*as determined by COSEWIC: The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada