Extinct Giant River Otter Resurfaces in Wild as Several More Born in Captivity
On 5/28/21 at 2:07 PM EDT
A species of otter long considered to be extinct has recently resurfaced literally.
Footage of the extinct giant river otter bobbing its head from the water while on an afternoon swim has excited the animal conservation community, which thought the species had died out in the wild.
According to a Facebook post from the Fundación Rewilding Argentina, conservation director Sebastian Di Martino spotted the species that was believed to be extinct while kayaking on the Bermejo River in the Impenetrable National Park in Argentina on May 16.
“Evidence that these earlier humans caused appreciable losses is mostly poor to nonexistent, which suggests that it was deleterious cultural practices overhunting, excessive resource exploitation of modern humans that were behind later insular extinctions. Prior to migration of modern Homo sapiens across the planet, other populations and species of hominins lived on a number of the world’s islands,” says Ross MacPhee, senior curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Mammalogy, and a co-author on the study.
“In fact, there were only two islands we recorded where all the extinctions which occurred are coincident with human arrival - Kume Island in Japan and Cyprus in the Mediterranean. All the other islands, the records of extinctions don’t seem to line up with human arrivals, they are staggered, with no clear discerning cause,” said Professor Louys.
UH Manoa, called the footage “groundbreaking.”
“We’re observing how these animals are manipulating their prey and preparing the prey for capture. [The footage] is allowing us to gain new insights that we really haven’t been able to do before,” Bejder said.
According to Bejder, around 3,000 humpback whales visit Alaska during the summer feeding period. When the whales leave their foraging grounds and migrate 3,000 miles to Hawaii, they stop eating until their return several months later. Upon their return, the whales are very hungry, so they immediately begin bubble-net fishing.
BCwhales.org, participate in this cooperative feeding behavior. One whale typically dives below a school of prey and then slowly begins a spiral dance upward, blowing bubbles in a circular motion to form a bubble net. The bubbles rise to the surface, trapping the school of fish and forcing them toward the surface near the center of the circle.
It was previously theorized that humans were involved with the extinction of woolly mammoths but a new study has contradicted that, suggesting that their demise was likely caused by extremely cold temperature drops.
The new study, which was conducted by German researchers, claimed that North America’s megafauna (woolly mammoths, giant beavers, large ground-dwelling sloths, armadillo-like “glyptodons”, etc…) were driven to extinction because of near-glacial climate change. The researchers analyzed the population of these animals based on radiocarbon records and noticed that their numbers increased during a warming period about 14,700 years ago but drastically declined during a very cold period around 12,900 years ago.