A sea otter feeding in Glacier Bay, Alaska photographed by scientist Jim Bodkin. Click image for a larger view. Ironically, it is the otter's fur that brought the animal to the brink of extinction.

This was on full display last week while I was leading a photographic tour of bald eagles and sea otters in Alaska.

Sea otters are keystone species in kelp forests. Kelp forests rely on the top-down pressure sea otters exert via predation on ...

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, sea otters have recolonized Glacier Bay National Park with a vengeance. Several times each July, when the weather over southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National ...

In North America sea otters once ranged from Baja California, Mexico, all the way to Alaska. Between 1741 and 1911, the maritime fur trade fueled voracious large-scale hunting and trapping that ...

California sea otters (a.k.a. southern sea otters, distinct from the northern Pacific subspecies found from Washington to Alaska) were nearly wiped out by the turn of the 20th century. An ...