Name: Sea Otter LOVES Ice and Goes VIRAL!
Uploaded: 2024-11-04T05:33:19.000Z
Duration: 7 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

TikTok named my video of a sea otter banging ice cubes together the top video in 2021 to make you smile.

We even beat out big names like Noodle the Pug and Ed Sheeran.

Even more recently, I had another sea otter video go mega viral.

Both videos have around 60 million views and thousands of comments, including many questions like why do they like ice so much?

These videos have more questions than Koenig can hold ice cubes.

So I decided to answer these questions in a new segment I'm calling Behavior Breakdown.

It might seem strange, but there's a really simple explanation, instinct.

Banging things together is a very natural behavior for sea otters.

Their diet out in the ocean consists of things like abalone, mussels, clams.

All these things have a very hard outer shell.

So sea otters will use a rock to smash those items.

However, under human care, they often have it pretty easy.

All those items are usually shucked for them in order to provide quality control and to control the amount that they're getting.

But that doesn't mean that that natural instinct goes away.

A sea otter's natural desire to bang things is so strong that they don't even need to be holding ice cubes.

So we, as trainers, find a way for them to express that.

And in this case, it's ice treats and toys.

Sometimes we'll even freeze bits of their food, like fish, inside those ice cubes for them to crack into and enjoy.

It's very similar to another curious behavior, clapping.

While not quite as viral as the videos of Kunik and her ice treats, cat-mite clapping is quite popular.

Especially over on my Twitch channel, where you can actually get it as an emote to use in chat.

No, while humans will clap when they're excited or enthusiastic, sea otters are not quite the same.

What's going on here is something that's taking place behind the scenes of the camera view.

So we, as trainers, actually trained cat-mite to do this behavior.

The same is true for the videos of her tapping on different surfaces, like you can see here.

Dentists will tell you that crunching on ice is bad for your teeth.

Sea otter molars are significantly more robust than human teeth.

In fact, in the wild, sea otters don't always use rocks to break into those hard shells.

In fact, this can actually be good for their teeth, scraping off bits of plaque and debris.

And ice is a bit more forgiving than shells.

If you actually look at the full-length video of Kunik in her tub banging those two ice cubes, you'll see her flippers steaming at the end.

Believe it or not, sea otters have a harder time keeping cool than staying warm.

Their normal body temperature is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, well over the natural body temperature of humans.

And that's despite them spending their entire lives out in the cold North Pacific Ocean.

Sea otters can maintain this body temperature using two things.

First, they have an incredibly high metabolism.

Second, the densest fur coat in the animal kingdom.

It is actually so dense that it is completely waterproof.

This makes them like little fur-covered furnaces.

Ice and cold things to eat helps regulate their internal body temperature.

Why don't you let me know down in the comments.

Or head on over to my Twitch channel and we can chat about it.

I was just thinking you might put this thing here.

Well, I mean, it's actually just the same.