{"id":582410,"date":"2020-10-16T15:49:55","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T19:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/?p=582410"},"modified":"2020-10-16T15:59:01","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T19:59:01","slug":"helping-out-river-otters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/bbtw_updates\/helping-out-river-otters\/","title":{"rendered":"\ufeffHelping Out River Otters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/strong>River otters are adorable members of the weasel family.  With a sleek body and tail, short legs, webbed feet and waterproof fur, it’s made for life in the water. The river otter lives across Canada in small groups, and although its name suggests it spends all <\/em>its time in rivers, it often comes onto land to find shelter, rest, and travel between different waterways. This can be a big challenge, especially in the winter, when the river otter must keep its exposure to cold and predators to a minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It’s really important that we learn about these special creatures\nso we can help to keep their habitats safe and protected. That’s why Earth\nRangers has been working with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada to\nlearn more about the open water and areas along Yukon’s shorelines that otters\nuse to get from one waterway to another. In fact, if you adopted a river otter\nthrough the Earth Rangers app, you’ve helped to support WCS Canada. Read on and\nfind out more about their important work!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Project
\n<\/strong>WCS Canada investigated the size of the river otter population in\nan area in southern Yukon during the winter in 2019-2020. Before they did any\nriver otter investigating, however, the researchers had some other work to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Led by Dr. Don Reid, researchers first divided up the shorelines\nthey were going to visit into 500-metre-long segments. Then they looked at\nwhether the water near each segment was likely to be open water (without ice on\ntop). Areas with open water in winter are preferred by river otters, because\nit’s easy for them to get in and out of the waterway. The researchers divided\nup the shorelines into three categories: high likelihood of use (river otters\nwould probably live there), low likelihood of use (river otters probably\nwouldn’t live there) and no use (river otters weren’t expected to be there at\nall).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Investigation
\n<\/strong>How would the team figure out if river otters were living in an\narea? (River otters don’t have addresses, after all). Simple: just look for\ntracks! By looking for snow tracks near the shoreline, researchers could see\nwhere the otters came onto the land, and where they re-entered the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of ten days in December, Dr. Reid and the researchers\ngot busy. First,  they visited 36 randomly chosen locations where river\notters were highly likely to be found. They found otters living in 11 of the\nareas, and a total of 27 individual river otters were accounted for. Some\notters were alone, but a group of six otters was found in one segment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In March, the team visited different shoreline segments in the\nYukon. They found the most river otters in the high likelihood areas (in 34\nsegments of shoreline, they found ten with otters in them, for a total of 24\nriver otters). They found some otters in the low likelihood areas (in 63\nsegments, they found river otters in five, with seven otters accounted for).\nAnd in the areas they didn’t expect to find river otters, well, they didn’t.\nOut of ten segments, none had evidence of river otters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Results
\n<\/strong>So what does this all mean? Well, the researchers discovered that\nit’s really, really <\/em>important that otters have access to open water all\nyear round, especially in winter. And an area is even more attractive to otters\nif the open water drains in to a lake.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With this information, scientists can advise the Yukon government to map and identify these river otter habitats as Key Wildlife Areas. This will help to protect them from development and human interference. And THAT, Earth Rangers, is a huge win for the river otter! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How YOU Can Get Involved
<\/strong>Earth Rangers, if you love river otters as much as we do, you can help out by adopting a river otter of your very own. Log onto the Earth Rangers app and you’ll be able to add a sweet little otter to your family and help us continue to preserve the habitats of real-life river otters! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In collaboration with:<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

River otters are adorable members of the weasel family.  With a sleek body and tail, short legs, webbed feet and waterproof fur, it’s made for life in the water. The river otter lives across Canada in small groups, and although its name suggests it spends all its time in rivers, it often comes onto land […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":580779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[425,449,931],"tags":[174,1303,1304],"class_list":{"0":"post-582410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bbtw_updates","8":"category-animals","9":"category-all","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-river-otter","12":"tag-wildlife-conservation-society"},"pp_force_visibility":null,"pp_subpost_visibility":null,"pp_inherited_force_visibility":null,"pp_inherited_subpost_visibility":null,"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.earthrangers.com\/EN\/CA\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}