Sea Otters and Their Kitchen Tools | Nature Tech

Hello, I'm Damion Washington and welcome back to the OVC. Today we're going to be showing you a piece of kitchen tech that's an absolute must-have for culinary otters like yourself. Oh, you're not an otter. Well, I guess you could be. How am I supposed to know? In any case, you're going to want to check out how these marine mammals have figured out how to craft their cuisine. Sea otters, known by your mom as those adorable little water puppies, love to feast on shelled creatures like clams, mussels, and rock crabs. But those shells can be difficult to get into, so in order to get to the good stuff on the inside, otters have designed a method even Anthony Bourdain hasn't tried. It smashes, it crashes, it gets all the yummy mollusk meat you could ask for in just a few swift smacks. The most common culinary tool of the otter is the anvil. The otter will dive underwater, sometimes for as long as two minutes or more, finally returning with their food and a suitable anvil, usually a rock. Floating on their back, the otter places the rock on its stomach, creating a hard surface to use as a clam or a mussel opener. With the flat sides of the shell on their palms, the sea otter will crack down on the anvil at a rate about two times per second until the mussel cracks, which usually takes about 30 to 40 strikes. Otters are also known to use a hammering technique in which they use an object to Genius! While the tummy smashing technique is an instinctive trait, otter pups often learn the finer points of this skill through observation and can even develop the same dietary tastes as their mothers. Interestingly, tummy tech is not practiced by the same frequency by all otter populations. A 2014 study showed that some otters in the Aleutian Islands only use tools roughly 10 to 25 percent of the time, whereas some California otters exceed 90 percent. This is in part due to the toughness of the food available in their respective environments, but it also kind of makes sense that the Californians are just more tech crazy. That being said, some otters prefer softer foods that don't require any tech expertise, such as fish or urchins. In the human world, this is basically the equivalent of choosing a drive-thru over preparing a home-cooked meal. Sometimes you just want a quick and easy bite. No muss, no fuss. You might find yourself asking, hey what happens if an otter catches a crab or some other treat that just won't sit still while the otters eat their other prey? Is there an answer that's equal parts clever and adorable? Well, some sea otters will wrap crabs up in kelp, immobilizing them to snack on them later. Now you might be asking, hey Damien, as an otter, which I may or may not be, where am I going to store my fancy gadget? Well, that's the best part. Otters have pockets of loose skin under each arm that can act as a pouch, allowing them to carry their favorite rocks with them wherever they go. But wait, that's not all. Sea otters aren't just limited to rocks. Sea otters will make a hammer and anvil out of the finest, reclaimed, reused, local discarded driftwood, broken glass, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, or any other man-made, artisanal, craft-brewed, small-batch, mass-produced, one-time-use, disposable refuse drifting through the coastal waters. Garbage. I'm talking about garbage. So you'll never prepare raw crabs or sea urchins the same way again. If you're an otter, that is. And if you are an otter, let us know, because my mom would love for me to be friends with an adorable water bucket. Hey, to find out more about technology that animals use, click this video.