Otters at a Georgia Aquarium have tested positive for COVID, an aquarium official shared. The animals are expected to make a full recovery. Numerous Asian small-clawed otters tested positive, PEOPLE reported on April 18. “They began exhibiting mild respiratory symptoms such as sneezing, runny noses, mild lethargy, and some began coughing,” the aquarium wrote in a […]
Tag: otters
Furry engineers: sea otters in California’s estuaries surprise scientists
When Brent Hughes started studying the seagrass beds of Elkhorn Slough, an estuary in Monterey Bay on California’s central coast, he was surprised by what he found. In this highly polluted estuary, excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff spur the growth of algae on seagrass leaves, which kills the plants. Yet in 2010, Hughes noticed that […]
Oregon Wildlife Commission Keeps Cruel Trapping Practices in Place
PORTLAND,Ore.— After a contentious 12-hour meeting, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission rejected conservation proposals to adopt a uniform 24-hour trap check time for all wildlife and to ban beaver trapping on federally managed public lands. The commission also voted 6-1 last Friday to continue the state’s existing furbearer trapping and hunting regulations for the […]
Petition: Ban Wild Animal Cafés Where Otters, Raccoons, and More are Held Captive!
There are positive ways to put animals and humans in close contact with good intentions for good reason. For instance, there are dog and cat cafés where profits go to helping homeless animals get adopted and helping shelters. However, those are companion animals; they are domesticated. They need the help of humans to survive and […]
Austria flouts EU law to cull otters
Lower Austria is planning to trap and shoot 40 otters in the very near future. This is in spite of the fact that otters are protected by the European Union Fauna and Flora Habitats Directive. This is in response to appeals from fishermen stating that there are too many otters. The numbers quoted for that […]
First Pan-African Otter Training Workshop held in Tanzania
The latest Red List update by IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, has placed an alarming 12 of the 13 species of otter worldwide showing a declining population, with the North American river otter the only one shown as “stable”. Of those 13, Sub-Saharan Africa is home to three species: The spotted-necked otter (Lutra […]