Endless Ocean

Sea otters

Yes. You can see the bundles of sleek, glossy fur floating about in the coastal, reefy waters within Katmai National Park just off the coast of Alaska. (If I had a say in one of their nicknames , I would call them the Teddy bears of the ocean,   because they're so cute ).

Sea otters are truly irresistible. They're cut, cuddly-looking animals with friendly faces and playful personalities.

Well, even this cute furballs have problems surviving.
Believe it or not, these delightful creatures were almost hunted to extinction. One reason is that they were valuable because of their fur coats. In the recent years, sea otters have made a remarkable comeback although some populations are still being threatened, their numbers are gradually increasing throughout most of their range.

There are twelve species of otters including this group of sea otters. Sea otters belong to the weasel family. Like weasels, they're closely badgers, minks and the mammal that spooks most of us as well as our dogs and cats because of its real stinky spray
Can you guess the animal?
If you said skunk you're correct! Can you believe one of the cutest mammals we know is a close relative of the stinkiest one? That shocked me when I first read it. (This is information from one of my zoobooks.)
The Sea otter's scientific name Enhydra lutris, which, not surprisingly translates directly into and means "otter in the water."

This name fits sea otters well because the ocean is their home and house. They eat, sleep, play, mate, give birth, and feed their young at sea. Sea otters are marine mammals, they breathe air, feed milk to their young, are warm-blooded, and they've have fur on their bodies. 

Did you know sea otters are among the smallest of all marine mammals?

I certainly didn't think that.

Found in the North Pacific ocean, sea otters usually live along rocky shorelines where there are cliffs and sheltered coves. One hundred and fifty thousand sea otters live off the coast of Alaska and Russia, while about 1,700 live along the coast of Central California. Groups of sea otters are called raft which can be found hanging around kelp beds where there's an abundance of food.
Sea otters are playful by nature and for this reason have been nicknamed "clowns of the kelp bed." There is yet another nickname for perhaps the older male sea otters who happen to have white whiskers giving them the name "*old men of the sea."
(*Not to be confused with Ernest Hemingway's book called "Old man of the sea which shows what happens when anyone underminded, and despised. I say it is one of the best stories I have ever seen when it comes to the right feelings of failure and being depressed. If you write horror, it is a perfect place to get some inspiration since the ending is all that happy at all. The man drowns in the ocean after a shark gets accidentally caught on his hook and rips his tiny boat apart. In this book, Hemingway points out that this man only had one true friend and that was a very young boy whose parents refused to let him help the old man halfway through the story. The boy saw grief and the feeling of the loneliness in the old man, but the other characters in the story loomed down on him like he was a nuisance and a beggar. Those who see and think like that are both metaphorically speaking blind and lost. In simpler words, it would mean they've already stumbled once or twice in their lifetime.)