Talk:Otter
From Academic Kids
Cut from main page:
Males kidnap pups from mothers to use as extortion for food. Rough sex that often kills female. Pups steal food from mother. Do not react well with crude oil. Beneficial for kelp beds and natural fish nurseries. Bad for sea urchins and shellfishermen. Tie themselves up in kelp to keep from floating away while sleeping. They are the newly discovered favorite snack of orca.
This is a mix of questionable assertions (kidnapping pups, tying themselves up in kelp) and weird phrasing ("do not react well with crude oil"). Someone needs to verify (or refute) the odder bits, and rephrase the rest. I'll try to get to it soon, but can't promise anything. Vicki Rosenzweig
Vicki, others, I added a bit here about size, weight, agricultural damage. I think the kelp bed/shellfish issues should be included. Don't know about the "rough sex", etc. I do wonder at the implication that the native Americans did *not* use otter fur. Ortolan88
Many more otters were trapped after European contact, for export.
On weight, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which manages sea otters in Alaska, has very different size numbers than you found: http://www.state.ak.us/local/akpages/FISH.GAME/notebook/marine/seaotter.htm says adult males are generally 70-90 pounds, some up to 100, and adult females generally 40-60 pounds. What's the source for your numbers? (The Alaska page is a few years old, but this doesn't seem like something that would change rapidly).
I seem to have some free time, so will try to find more info about otters generally, including their mating. Vicki Rosenzweig
Please! Someone who knows how images are handled in wikipedia articles, fix the ending of the article! -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen 12:56, Dec 15, 2003 (UTC)
"as far south as Japan" -- anybody know which part of Japan? Japan is a very long country... it stretches far north enough that it has some standing territorial disputes with Russia, and clusters of islands in Okinawa to the south are on the same latitude as Taipei. -- Mote 03:31, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Help someone revert the latest vandal! He's added spurious crap to the infos! -68.39.174.205 11:12, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
