Name: Are Sea Otters Left-Handed?? | A Marine Biologist Explains!
Uploaded: 2025-08-13T00:19:03.000Z
Duration: 12 min 8 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 your host, KP, a marine biologist with over a decade's worth of experience working with marine mammals.

Adverbs of manner

Recently, we took a deeper dive into how I'm training Joey, the world famous sea otter, how to spin.

The second conditional

And if you missed it, you can catch that video right up here.

If you're a fan of this channel or you watch my live stream over on my Twitch channel, you may be aware that Joey the sea otter is not an ambi-turner.

Which has everyone asking, can animals be left or right pawed?

So today, we're going to take a deeper dive and try to answer that question.

But first, don't forget to like, subscribe, and head on over to my Twitch channel.

You can catch live streams and ask me your questions live.

But before we go any further, many people have been asking me why I'm even teaching him to spin in the first place.

The short answer is that learning something new is great for the brain.

The sea otters under my care live very easy lives.

They don't have to hunt for food and they don't have to worry about being hunted.

So that eliminates a lot of the things that would normally give them mental stimulation out in the dangerous ocean.

But mental stimulation is still important.

And that is part of the reason that we train new behaviors.

They might look silly to you, but they actually serve a really important purpose of keeping the mind and the body engaged.

If you want to learn more about how and why we train, you can check out my old video up  So let's start talking about Joey's spin behavior.

When we teach an animal to do these types of behaviors, we usually train them to go in both directions.

Each direction or each behavior will have a unique hand signal.

So in this case for a spin, to spin to the left, we ask it with our left hand.

To spin to the right, we ask with our right hand.

Usually we teach the animals how to spin to the right first.

I can only assume that for my left handed viewers, this is painfully obvious.

Whether it be the cup holders in your car, the swipe for credit cards, right handed scissors, and even the mouse for your computer.

About 90% of the human population are right hand dominant.

And for many years, scientists actually believed that handedness was a uniquely human trait.

But there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that animals may have right or left flipperness.

It's something called the corpus callosum, which is the nerve tract that separates the brain into left and right hemispheres.

There are studies that have linked a high level of handedness with a smaller corpus callosum.

And those with a larger corpus callosum tend to be more ambidextrous individuals.

Marine mammals like sea lions, seals, and sea otters, like our friend Joey, are also placental mammals.

Which is one of the three subdivisions of the mammalia class of animals.

Which means that they have a corpus callosum.

And in my opinion, means that they can be right or left pawed.

Quick disclaimer, the evidence that I am about to present to you is not in a scientific study.

It is simply my opinion and based on my experiences as a marine mammal trainer.

Still, observation is a key part to science, and so I think it's worth discussing.

Speaking of which, if you have a dog, a cat, or any other animal in your life that you think displays left or right handedness, drop it in the comments below and let me know.

Let's head back to Joey and how he's learning how to spin.

I'm going to show you exactly how much progress he's made, so hang in there, I promise.

But first, I want to dive a bit deeper into how he seems to be more comfortable spinning to the left.

Most of the animals that I've worked with seem to have no problem spinning to the right.

However, Mac, who is famous for his adorable food vocalizations and his easygoing nature.

I don't have any video evidence because this was years ago, but at first, Mac could only spin to the left.

That's how he learned in the first place, to the left, and you can see now, even though he can spin to the right, it looks slow and awkward.

While this is interesting, spinning left or right may not be the best example of handedness.

Catmai is an extremely intelligent animal.

Now you can see here, she's actually using her left paw to tap.

Now, of course, we could probably teach her to tap with her right paw, but this is the way she's always done it, and she exclusively taps with her left.

Every animal that I've worked with seems to have a dominant flipper that they would rather tap with.

Most of the sea lions and the walruses that I worked with actually struggled to learn to tap their left flipper.

They're just far more comfortable tapping their right flipper.

And in fact, if you ask them for the left flipper, they still sometimes get confused and just tap both anyway.

Back to sea otters, as I'm well aware that the majority of my subscribers are huge sea otter fans.

Do you see how she only moves her left paw?

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Are Sea Otters Left-Handed?? | A Marine Biologist Explains!

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