Do otters hold hands? Yes, but kelp does the real work

The short answer

Yes, but the famous version of it leaves something out.

Sea otters really do rest with their forepaws linked. The image is common enough that NOAA's sanctuaries office describes the animals by it: "With their knack for naps and holding hands as they float, their cute faces are pervasive both along the coast and on social media."

The everyday anchor for a sleeping wild otter, though, is seaweed. To keep from drifting while they rest, sea otters often wrap themselves up in kelp or seagrass, forming something that resembles a raft.

Both habits solve the same problem. A sea otter sleeps on its back, on the surface, in water that is going somewhere. Nothing about that position keeps it in place. Hook a paw through a kelp frond, or hook a paw through a neighbour, and you are still there when you wake up.

A raft is bigger than two otters

The word raft is the giveaway. It names the whole floating group.

On the Washington coast, the National Park Service describes sea otters forming rafts of 10 to 100 individuals, using kelp to tie themselves to other sea otters of the same sex while they rest and eat. Males with males, females with females.

So the picture most people carry, two otters paw in paw, is the smallest possible version of something that usually runs much larger and involves a lot more seaweed.

Why drifting matters so much

Most marine mammals handle cold water with blubber. Sea otters do not have that option.

A sea otter carries little subcutaneous fat and depends instead on clean, dense, water-resistant fur. Monterey Bay Aquarium puts the two-layer coat at more than a million hairs per square inch. That coat is the entire heating system.

Fur insulates only while it stays clean and full of trapped air, so grooming is upkeep on the heating system. Running a body this way is also expensive. A single sea otter eats about a quarter of its body weight each day. Try to picture eating a quarter of yourself before bedtime, every day, for life. When a hard-shelled item like a crab or a clam is on the menu, an otter may crack it open with a rock.

Put those two facts together and the kelp makes sense. An otter that drifts while it sleeps wakes up cold, hungry and a long swim from breakfast.

Field note: two sea otters holding paws are, technically, double-parked.

The coat that keeps them alive is also the weak point

Fur beats blubber at insulation right up until the fur gets dirty.

That is what made the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill so brutal for the species. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council records 871 sea otter carcasses collected across the spill area, with estimates of total immediate deaths running as high as 40 percent, or 2,650, of the roughly 6,500 sea otters living in the western part of Prince William Sound.

The recovery took a quarter of a century. By 2014 the US Geological Survey reported that sea otters had returned to pre-spill numbers within the most heavily oiled areas of the Sound.

The kelp they sleep in needs them back

The relationship runs both ways.

Sea otters eat sea urchins, and urchins eat kelp. Otters help maintain kelp forests by keeping urchin numbers down, because urchins left unchecked will clear-cut a forest. Without otters, as Monterey Bay Aquarium describes it, the grazers strip the kelp and leave behind desolate areas called urchin barrens.

An otter anchoring itself to a kelp frond is holding onto something it helped keep alive.

Our otter holds nothing

We put an otter on a lot of shirts, and he is the wrong kind of otter for this article.

Murder Otter is a river otter. No kelp, no rafts, no Pacific swell, no holding anyone's paw. He lives in fresh water at a wildlife sanctuary in our Atomic Critters universe, he turned up there on his own, and he stays because he decided to. He is not a pet and he was not rescued into a cage.

He also has red eyes, which is not something a river otter is born with. That part has an explanation, and the explanation is the story. Kagen took one look at those eyes and called him Murder Otter. Renji objected. The name stuck anyway, which is how most nicknames work.

Field note: everybody at the sanctuary assumes Mo is planning something. Mo is usually just being an otter. Usually.

Chapter 2 of the graphic novel is called The Otter Paradox, which is as good a place as any to meet him.

And if you would rather wear him than read him, he is on the Murder Otter balloon sketch tee. The rest of him lives in the Murder Otter collection.

Sea otters hold hands. Mo holds a grudge. Once an otter has a grip on something, it is hard to shift either way.