Name: How Do Sea Otters Survive Atmospheric Rivers?
Uploaded: 2025-08-10T15:24:49.000Z
Duration: 8 min 17 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...

I'm on the west coast of North America, that is.

And once again, the west coast is getting slammed by an atmospheric river.

Which brings me to the topic of today's video.

A few weeks ago, I had an Instagram follower ask me, what do sea otters do during storms?

And what about other marine mammals like seals, sea lions, or walruses?

I'm KP, a marine biologist who has spent a decade working with sea otters.

Coastal storms have increased in number and frequency.

And there is a strong body of evidence that shows that these storms can adversely affect many marine mammals, including sea otters.

Unlike you or me who typically head indoors when it's cold and miserable out, sea otters don't really have that option.

For starters, sea otters are not very migratory and will generally occupy a territory that is just a few kilometers in size, and they'll remain there year round.

So when storms hit, sea otters really have no choice but to just ride them out.

Thankfully, sea otters are almost perfectly adapted to life in the rainy Pacific Northwest.

With around 600,000 to 1 million hair follicles per square inch, it is the densest fur coat in the animal kingdom.

Their fur has two layers, long waterproof guard hairs, as well as a warm and dense undercoat that helps trap air and warmth.

You might even catch otters blowing air into their fur or see bubbles rising from their coat when they're swimming underwater.

Most sea otters will spend their entire lives out to sea, never even setting foot on land.

Even in the heaviest downpour, a sea otter's skin will stay completely dry, as long as they've properly groomed their fur coat.

I will say that in my expertise, sea otters don't tend to sleep quite as well when it is pouring rain.

They'll kind of just lie there looking really disgruntled, a bit like a wet cat.

But I'm still often impressed by what they can sleep through.

It's easy to forget that these are wild animals who have survived for thousands of years.

And they are fully capable of weathering pretty extreme storms.

I mean, just this week, our friends at Sea Otter Savvy shared this video of a rattlesnake weathering a hail storm.

And they're all kind of, you know, creeping together closer as the hail gets worse.

But yeah, I mean, they're kind of just laying there and just getting pelted with the hail.

It's just, it's just part of being a wild sea otter, I think.

This behavior where sea otters hold hands is known as rafting.

It is one of the ways they've learned how to deal with storms, because it's not so much the rain or the hail that's the problem, but the wind and the waves.

Anyone who has ever swam in the ocean knows that waves can push you in directions you don't want to go.

So sea otters, especially mothers and their pups, will hold paws in order to keep from washing away from each other.

They also tend to raft up in areas shielded from heavy wind and waves, in estuaries, coves, and especially kelp forests.

Sea otters have a special relationship with kelp forests, which I talked about in this video right up here.

A healthy kelp forest can reduce wave energy by up to 85 percent, even during these bigger storms.

And sea otters will even wrap themselves in kelp and use it as a sort of seat belt to prevent them from drifting away while they sleep.

But not all marine mammals are as well adapted to weather these storms.

Seals and sea lion pups are especially vulnerable to heavy rains and high winds.

Unlike sea otters who give birth out in the ocean typically, pinnipeds haul out on land in large breeding colonies known as rookeries.

Newborn pinnipeds are pretty weak and need to stay in the rookery for several months, simply because they're not able to swim very well.

In this time of early life, pups can easily be washed out of the colony by waves, making them extremely vulnerable to stranding and starvation due to separation from their mothers.

This winter, a string of nine consecutive atmospheric rivers hit the west coast, causing epic storm surges that tragically swept a large number of newborn elephant seals out to sea.

Scientists are still taking stock of how many were lost, but they're already saying that this year's mortality rate is more than they normally see.

This isn't isolated to the west coast of North America either.

In Chile, a study was recently published on the vulnerability of marine mammals to coastal storms, specifically the South American sea lion, which is a really weird looking sea lion, by the way.

The study found a strong correlation between wave intensity and the number of stranded sea lion pups.

While sea otters are typically better than pinnipeds at weathering storms, weather-related strandings do occur.

A sea otter that I worked with named Katmai.

Katmai was around two or three months old when she was found alongside an Alaskan road.

The people who rescued her theorized that she had been separated from her mother during a recent storm that produced exceptionally strong waves.

Attempts to locate her mother failed, so she was hand-raised by my friends at the Alaska Sea Life Center.

Because she was hand-raised, Katmai was deemed non-releasable and has gone on to live a very fulfilling life as an ambassador for her species.

And to be honest, now Katmai never has to deal with these surging storms and giant waves like her wild counterparts out in the Pacific Ocean.

And I just want to take a minute to say how much I love getting questions like this.

Honestly, talking about this stuff is my biggest passion.

The very reason that I started this YouTube channel way back in 2020 was actually to reach out to people, teach people about the ocean animals that we have, and hopefully inspire people to be a little bit more passionate about our oceans, the creatures that live in them, and conservation.

So if you ever have a question, drop it in the comments or send me a DM.

And if you like the video, make sure to hit that like and subscribe button and you'll be notified the next time one goes live.

And that way you'll be notified the next time that we have a video.

And what about other marine mammals like seals?

You're looking at me like you're hating the way this is going.

I'm looking at you like I'm getting ray in my face.