Revealing the Services of Sea Otters, Animals Against Climate Change
The sea otter (Enhydra lutris) is an animal with 140,000 strands of hair on its body, which is 700 times thicker than the hair on a human head. These marine mammals keep themselves warm by eating as much as a quarter of their body weight in a day.
Some other animals eat more for their weight or play an important role in protecting their environment, said Brent Hughes, a marine ecologist who studies coastal habitats at Sonoma State University, in California.
Now scientists are studying how sea otters help ecosystems by capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it as biomass and detritus in the deep ocean, to prevent it from being converted back into carbon dioxide and resulting in climate change.
Reporting from the BBC, Monday (20/9/2021), this marine mammal was once widespread in coastal waters of the North Pacific Ocean, from Baja California to Alaska, even to coral reefs in Russia and Japan. However, in the 1700s to 1800s, fur hunters reduced their population to about 2,000 individuals.
Since then, conservation efforts have been made to ensure the sea otter recovers, but the range of this marine mammal is about 4,000 km from the shoreline. James Estes, a marine ecologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz who also dived in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the 1970s, documented seaweed turning into an underwater desert in the absence of this hairy mammal and its role in protecting marine forests. to stay fertile.
Sea Otter VS Sea urchin
To maintain a high metabolic rate, mammals must eat constantly, their favorite food is sea urchins, which are easy to catch and dense in calories. Today, sea otters eat so many sea urchins that the invertebrate population remains low.
"They have a disproportionately large impact on ecosystems compared to their abundance," said Heidi Pearson, a marine biologist at the University of Southeast Alaska. This is what makes sea otters such a key species, because without them, the stability of the entire ecosystem could be lost.
When sea otters pentingnya togel data dalam prediksi hasil are lost from an ecosystem, sea urchin numbers soar. The herbivorous sea urchins then mow the seaweed, chewing the handles in their place and letting the rest of the giant algae drift away. Sea urchins even survive after cutting the sea grass, and wait under the new seaweed sprouts and then eat the young seaweed.
This invertebrate is known as the "zombie hedgehog" because of its ability to devour the seaweed ecosystem. However, if the sea otter returns, it can bring the herbivore under control and allow the seaweed to thrive again.