Why Do Sea Otters

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Michelle Staedler has been a friend to sea otters since 1986. As a marine biologist, she has involved herself with the Sea Otter Recovery Plan as well as helping with new policies about sea otter conservation. California sea otters have been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 1977.
In her efforts to help the animals, Michelle studies what sea otters eat and how they raise their pups. Michelle will often follow the same otters for a period of time.
Michelle uses a VHF (very high frequency) radio receiver to locate a study animal. The otters she observes have been outfitted with radio transmitters. That way they can be located and studied more easily.
This kind of research involves spying on a mother otter, watching …show more content…
She and other researchers have been studying the ways that humpback whales locate food. It turns out these whales have a few tricks up their flippers.
Susan specializes in acoustic communication. She was part of a project that spent more than 10 years monitoring the whale's feeding behaviors. The work was done off the coast of Massachusetts. They tagged the whales with special recording devices that could work underwater. This way Susan and her team could study the sounds whales made as they searched the seafloor for food. They hoped to discover some links between the unique sounds they made and the particular feeding activity.
One thing they discovered was that the whales made "tick-tock" noises when they hunted in a group during the night. The sounds were like clocks ticking in the pitch-black water. Perhaps the sounds spooked their prey. Prey was usually eel-like fish called sand lance that buried themselves in the ocean floor. When the fish popped up, the whales could snatch them up and eat them. But the researchers also noticed that the whales did not make the sound when they hunted alone. They were silent. It seemed that the whale sounds were alerting others in the group that they'd found something good to eat. It was like a dinner …show more content…
That was when marine scientists Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that humpback whales "sing.” A single whale produced a series of sounds sometimes for as long as 30 minutes. Then it repeated the same series exactly the same way, often for several hours without pausing. At the time, the scientists had no idea what the songs meant, or if they were sung by male, female, or both sexes. They did discover that each individual sang its own song. Roger put out a record album in 1970 called Songs of the Humpback Whale. That recording helped to change the way people saw the animal world, especially marine
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