The Water Walker

The Water Walker

Like with most animals, the more you know about Sea Otters the more fascinating they become. They're the only marine mammal on earth that doesn't use fat or blubber to help keep them warm while living in a cold, heat-sucking environment. Instead, they rely upon their thick and luxuriant coat as their main defense against hypothermia. And they spend a whole lot of their time grooming that coat - which includes running their front paws through it almost continuously. This preening does at least two things - it helps spread natural oils through the coat, and it fills the thick fur with air, which provides both extra insulation and buoyancy.

Which leads nicely into the title of this image - The Water Walker. The thing that struck me most about this otter was how darned high it could "stand" out of the water. Here the majority of its body is above the water - and it remained in this position (virtually motionless) for a good 20 seconds or more. While the otter's tail and webbed hind feet COULD have been hard at work under the surface thus providing the "lift" for the otter, the absolute stillness of the animal made me think that much of the lift was provided by pure buoyancy of the coat.

This image tells us something else about this otter - that it's likely a female. The scarred up nose is the giveaway - during mating the males climb on the back of the the females and then they reach over and chomp down (quite aggressively) on their "victim's" nose (if you ever saw sea otters mating you'd agree that "victim" is an appropriate term here - if they were humans the male otters would be charged with attempted murder each time they mated). Fortunately the females' noses do heal, and often when you see them with their young they have intact noses again!

Subject: Female Sea Otter (Enhydra lutris) stretching out of water
Location: Northern Vancouver Island region, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D750
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8E VR plus TC-20EIII (2x) teleconverter (800mm total focal length). Hand-held from floating Zodiac, VR on and in "Sport" mode.
Exposure: 1/2000s @ f8; ISO 1100. +0.33 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Moderate - this is about 75% of full frame...

A lot more info about this shot - including a 2400 pixel version of it - can be found here on my website.:

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/.

Comments and critiques welcomed - probably best to view the larger version prior to doing so!

Cheers...

Brad

PS: Like all wildlife images on my website and that I post on NPN, the subject is fully wild and completely unconstrained. Besides the potential impact of my presence, nothing has been done to intentionally alter or affect the ongoing behavior of the subject and, of course, there has been no use of any form of bait or other form of wildlife attractants (including vocalizations)