The southern sea otter is a keystone species in kelp forest communities, acting to increase the species diversity and providing ecosystem services. Despite federal protection since 1977, the southern sea otter population has struggled to recover and there are only an estimated 2,800 sea otters in California.
Listen to this conversation with Dr. James Estes, Emeritus Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at UCSC. Estes is author of Serendipity: An Ecologist’s Quest to Understand Nature and appears in “The Serengeti Rules,” a 2019 film about “five unsung heroes of modern ecology,” of which he is one. Of course, Jim is best known for his research on California sea otters, once almost wiped out, then recovered and now again threatened by marine toxins, disease, orcas and agricultural chemical runoff.
More information is available on the Tinker & Estes Lab’s web page.
Tom Lehrer, the musical satirist par excellence of the 1950s and 1960s, died this past July at age 97. Many listeners and their progeny...
Frequent listeners to Sustainability Now! know that, from time to time, interviews focus on animals, mostly from the perspective of animal rights and whether...
To avert the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. However, what this transition looks like and what...
