Monthly Archives: October 2018

How Do Sea Otters Stay Warm?

October 28, 2018Kodiak Wildlife, Sea OtterAlaskan Sea Otters, How Do Sea Otters Stay Warm, Northern Sea Otter, Robin Barefield, sea otter, Sea Otters near Kodiak Islandadmin

Northern sea otters (Enhydra lutris kenyoni) are common in the waters surrounding Kodiak Island. Our summer guests love watching and photographing these cute, curious animals as we pass by them in our boat. Some otters lie placidly on their backs and watch us motor past, and others dive from the perceived danger we create. A few otters repeatedly twist and turn in the water or turn summersaults, and we laugh at their comical antics. The truth is, though, sea otters don’t turn summersaults because they are having fun; these movements have the much more practical application of keeping the animals warm.

A marine mammal must maintain a body temperature near 100° F (37.8° C), and in Alaska, where the water temperature drops as low as 35° F (1.67° C), keeping warm can be a challenge. Other marine mammals have a thick layer of blubber to insulate themselves from the cold, but sea otters have very little fat and depend mainly on their fur for insulation. Sea otters have the thickest fur of any animal, with 850,000 to one million hairs per square inch (up to 150,000 per square centimeter). It is their dense, beautiful fur that made them so valuable to fur traders in the 1700’s and 1800’s.

A sea otter’s fur consists of two layers. Long guard hairs form the outer layer, providing a protective coat to keep the underfur dry. The extremely dense underfur provides warmth, but for the fur to insulate efficiently, it must be clean, so sea otters spend a large portion of each day grooming and cleaning their fur.

In addition to cleaning his fur, an otter will somersault in the water and rub his body to trap air bubbles in his fur. These bubbles not only provide insulation but also help to keep his skin dry. An otter’s underfur ranges from brown to black, and the guard hairs vary from light brown to silver or black. Alaskan sea otters often have lighter fur on their heads, and the fur usually lightens as an otter gets older.

In addition to their warm fur, sea otters maintain their body heat by burning calories at a rapid rate. A sea otter’s metabolism is two to three times higher than the metabolism of a similar-sized land mammal. Because its metabolic rate is so high, a sea otter must eat 23 to 33 percent of its body weight each day. This means a fifty-pound otter will eat 11 to 16 lbs. (5 to 7.3 kg) of food every day.

Because very little fur covers an otter’s paws, they lose heat rapidly when submerged in cold water, otters conserve heat by keeping their forepaws out of the water and their hind flippers folded over their abdomens when resting and floating.

Since sea otters are dependent on their fur to keep them warm and insulated from the cold ocean water, and because they must continually groom their fur to maintain its insulating properties, they are extremely vulnerable to the effects of pollution. When oil or another pollutant soils an otter’s fur, the fur becomes matted, and it can no longer keep the animal warm. Matted fur can lead to hypothermia and death from exposure. When the otter tries to clean his fur to remove the pollutant, he ingests the toxin, which is also often fatal.

When the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Prince William Sound in 1989 and spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil, nearly 1000 sea otter carcasses were recovered, and biologists estimated the actual number of sea otters killed by the oil spill was anywhere from 41% to 80% higher than the number of dead otters observed.

Sea otters have many interesting adaptations to a life spent in the ocean. In this post, I told you how much sea otters need to eat each day just to stay warm, and next week, I’ll write about what sea otters eat and how they catch and eat their prey.

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Robin Barefield is the author of three Alaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar about how she became an author and why she writes Alaska wilderness mysteries. If you like audiobooks, check out her audiobook version of Murder Over Kodiak. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska.

Mystery Newsletter

Steve Levi, Author and Historian

October 14, 2018WritingAuthor Masterminds, Clara Nevada, Dead Men Do Come Back, Steve Levi, The Alaska Gold Rush, The Matter of the Vanishing Greyhoundadmin

This week, I want to welcome my friend and fellow author, Steve Levi. Steve is an Alaska historian and a fount of information about Alaska, past, and present. When I need an idea for one of my true-crime newsletters, I ask Steve, and the ideas fly from him so quickly, I can barely keep up with him. I know you will find Steve and his books as fascinating as I do, so take it away, Steve Levi!

Steve Levi: Master of the Impossible Crime

My motto is simple: “If you do not write something unique you have nothing.” As a writer, I look for what has not been done. After all, the last thing the world needs is one more biography of George Washington or the personal tribulations of a retired detective fighting alcoholism and struggling through a divorce when he/she gets called back for his/her ‘greatest case.’

Keeping with my motto, I want every one of my books to be different. In nonfiction, as an example, I am the only writer to have completed a book on the CLARA NEVADA, Alaska’s ghost ship. It sinks in the Lynn Canal in February of 1898 and ten years later comes back up – missing about $17 million in gold in today’s dollars. My biography of bush pilot Archie Ferguson – dubbed “The Craziest Pilot in the World” by the Saturday Evening Post—was and is the only one in existence and only possible because I took a dozen trips north of Arctic Circle to interview Inupiat Eskimo and whites who knew him. Ferguson died in 1962 and my interviews, on tape, will be around for the next century for anyone who wants a birds’ eye view of the Arctic from the 1920s to the 1960s. I am one of the few people in America – and possibly the only person – who has studied the long-term impact of a terrorist bomb on an American civilian population and my history of the Alaska Gold Rush was the first to make certain readers knew the Klondike Strike in the Yukon Territory of Canada was not the Alaska Gold Rush AND the stories of Jack London and poems of Robert Service have nothing to do with the Alaska Gold Rush.

Just as in nonfiction, I want my fiction to be unique. As far as I know, I am the only writer who produces “impossible crime” novels. An impossible crime in one where the detective has to solve HOW the crime was committed before he can go after the perpetrators. In THE MATTER OF THE VANISHING GREYHOUND, the San Francisco Police are following a Greyhound bus filled with $10 million in cash, four bank robbers and a dozen hostages. The bank robbers demand to cross the Golden Gate Bridge and the police simply allow the bus to roll onto the bridge and then close off both ends. But when they send their hostage negotiators out to the bus it is not there. It has vanished. How can you make a Greyhound bus disappear off the Golden Gate Bridge? You’ll have to read the book to find out! [www.authormasterminds.com.]
When I have to be conventional – as in a mystery with a murder – I make it as convoluted as possible. My novel DEAD MEN DO COME BACK has a murder but the murder is not the focus of the book. The murder – and subsequent reappearance of the cadaver twice – is simply the cover for two robberies of 250 pounds of gold from a mine in Juneau. Thus DEAD MEN DO COME BACK is unique as it offers the reader an on-the-ground look at the Alaska Gold Rush in Southeast Alaska where 250 pounds of gold was simply one-week’s shipment from one mine. Additionally, DEAD MEN DO COME BACK is a novel where the villains, multiple, get away with it because it is a “silent robbery,’ one where the insurance company pays and ‘everything goes away.’ That, in the real life, is a lot more common than one would believe.

If you are a writer, I have some VERY, VERY good news for you! We are entering a golden age of literature. Why? Because, to date, big publishers do not publish good books. They publish books they think will sell. So good books sit in author’s computers. If you don’t believe me, try to find a “mystery” book in a bookstore that is not a murder. If it is not a murder, the big New York “mystery” publishers will not consider it. So I had to go around the Big Publishers. And I was successful because now readers are looking for unusual novels. Readers are no longer satisfied with the same old/same old that has been offered by the bookstores and silver screen. They want different. And they are lucky. Today, with the advent of Netflix, YouTube and other low-budget entertainment outlets, there are increasing opportunities for writers – as long as those writers have unique offerings. And allow me to finish where I began. If you want to be successful in this brave new world of literature, you have to be different. To quote myself, “If you do not write something unique you have nothing.”

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Thank you, Steve Levi! Check out Steve’s website, his Author Masterminds page where you can buy his books, and his Amazon author’s page. If you would like to learn more about Steve, watch his webinar about how he became a published author, and if you stay until the end of the webinar, you will be able to download one of Steve’s books for free. Don’t miss Steve’s Impossible Crime books because they truly are unique.

How Can You Tell if a Kodiak Bear is a Male or a Female?

October 7, 2018Kodiak Bear, Kodiak WildlifeAlaskan Brown Bears, Brown Bears, Clues to differentiate male and female Kodiak bears, How to tell whether a bear is male or female, Kodiak Bear, Kodiak Island, Robin Barefieldadmin

Unlike cartoon bears, female Kodiak bears don’t wear hair ribbons on their head, so you must depend on other factors when trying to differentiate a male from a female bear. Last week, when I wrote about how to judge the size of a bear, I covered some of the ways body shape and musculature vary between males and females, but I will cover body shape and other clues in more detail this week.

Does the Bear Have Cubs?

This statement seems so obvious to me that I almost forgot to mention it. I’m sure most of you know male bears do not hang around with cubs. Regardless of what you might have seen in the movies, a Kodiak bear accompanying cubs is always their mother.

Do you see sex organs?

Minus cubs, there are only two sure ways to determine the sex of a Kodiak bear. The first is the presence of either nipples or a penis sheath and testicles. Even if you don’t see her cubs, you might see nipples in the armpit area of a nursing female when she walks. While often not visible, you sometimes see the penis sheath and testicles on a male, especially on a large boar.

Have you seen the bear urinate?

The only other way to be certain of the sex of the bear is to watch it urinate. Females urinate outward and to the rear, while males urinate straight down or forward between the legs. Females also sometimes squat to urinate.

Head and Shoulders:

If you do not see cubs or sex organs, and if the bear is not cooperative enough to urinate in front of you, you will have to depend on other clues to make an educated guess at the sex of the bear. Some of these are the same body shape differences I covered last week when I discussed how to determine the size of a bear.

A female brown bear’s head is narrower than a male’s, and her muzzle tapers, giving her a pointy nose. A female also has narrow shoulders roughly the same size as the head. Male Kodiak bears are more muscular than females. A male has a wide head and a square face. A large male’s forehead muscles bulge, creating a furrow or valley down the center of the forehead, and his massive shoulders are noticeably wider than his head.

Body Shape and Legs:

An adult female brown bear’s legs are shorter and thinner than the legs of an adult male, but unless you are comparing two bears standing side by side, it is not easy to determine the sex of the bear by looking at its legs. Males have robust front legs, and they are heavy through the ankles, ending at their wide feet. A female’s legs taper slightly, giving her the appearance of thinner ankles. Also, because females have shorter legs, their bodies hang lower to the ground.

The body, legs, and mid-section of a male brown bear look heavy and bulky, but since females aren’t exactly dainty in appearance, it is difficult and often misleading to use body shape to determine the sex of a bear. My husband, who had been around Kodiak bears all his life and has been a guide most of his life, says he is still sometimes surprised when he watches a young bear he is certain is a female until the bear urinates, and he realizes it’s a male.

Conclusion:

Unless a bear has cubs, you see her nipples or his genitalia, or you see the bear urinate, it is impossible definitively to differentiate male and female Kodiak bears. A huge bear is probably a boar, but large sows can also look huge, especially after a summer gorging on fish and berries.
The body shape of a bear provides clues to its gender. A heavy, bulky bear with a wide head and shoulders and a furrow down the middle of its forehead, is likely a male. It is more difficult, though, to distinguish sub-adult males from females.

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I hope my posts on bear size and gender answer a few questions about identifying bears in the field. The bottom line is that it’s impossible to pin down the gender of a bear from a distance, but you should be able to tell whether the bear is small or large by looking at the shape of its body.

Next week, I have a treat in store for you. My friend and fellow author, Steve Levi, has agreed to write a guest post about his books and his background. Be sure to stop by next week and meet Steve.

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Robin Barefield is the author of three Alaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar about how she became an author and why she writes Alaska wilderness mysteries. If you like audiobooks, check out her audiobook version of Murder Over Kodiak. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska.