Sea Otters, the Cutest Way to Fight Global Warming

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Apart from being one of the most adorable ocean-going animals on the planet, sea otters play a powerful role in sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. According to a new study written up this week in New Scientist, if the endangered fur balls' population were restored to pre-hunting levels, they could sequester a total of some 10 million tons of carbon in the ocean ecosystem, making them a useful weapon in the fight against global warming.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, otters were hunted to near extinction for their pelts. By the 1970s, conservation efforts had boosted their numbers back up near 125,000 animals. But the population has been in decline again of late, with perhaps 70,000 remaining in the Pacific waters off North America.
sea level rise
WATCH VIDEO: Find out how studying sea otter poo can help save the endangered animals.

Scientists aren't certain why -- otters are difficult to study in the wild, and little is known about how they reproduce or the stress they are under from predators and human activity (see video).

But Chris Wilmers of the University of California, Santa Cruz has worked out that otters play a crucial role in how the ecosystem draws carbon out of the atmosphere. By feasting on sea urchins, otters keep vast forests of kelp healthy, which he calculates can sequester 0.18 kilograms (0.40 pounds) of carbon for every square meter of habitat the animals occupy.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but multiplied across all of the coastal waters that could support a kelp forest ecosystem, it adds up. That makes sea otters very valuable animals indeed, and not just in a "let's save the cute fuzzy critters" sort of way.

As the New Scientist article puts it:

That means that if sea otters were restored to healthy populations along the coasts of North America they could collectively lock up a mammoth 10^10 kg of carbon – currently worth more than $700 million on the European carbon-trading market.

Wilmers speculates that restoring wolf populations and curtailing the illegal bushmeat trade could have similar positive effects on vegetation -- and carbon sequestration -- around the world.