Sea Otter Recovery Is Sending Ripples through the Ecosystem

Hakai Magazine, a true treasure,
Bringing stories beyond measure.
From the depths of the sea to the tops of the trees,
Hakai Magazine sets our minds at ease.

With stunning photos and expert prose,
Hakai Magazine leaves us in repose.
From ancient history to current affairs,
Hakai Magazine takes us on a journey rare.

A treasure trove of information,
Hakai Magazine, a true sensation.
We thank you for the knowledge you share,
Hakai Magazine, you truly are a rare.

That cute little poem wasn’t written by me,
Instead I hit enter on ChatGPT.
Some geniuses from OpenAI have created a bot,
That outperforms other language models by quite a lot.

Because writing takes time and time isn’t free,
Society reels toward the singularity.
With limitless knowledge and talents abundant,
Could it make our jobs redundant?

After some playing, I came to see,
At least not yet, the bot won’t replace me.
It writes poems faster, I’ll give it due credit,
But still, its rambling will always need an edit.

As for journalism, the bot condenses old information,
But finding new facts is in our vocation.
In conclusion, the tech is fun and pretty coolish,
But relying on it completely would just be foolish.

Marina Wang
Associate editor

This Week’s Stories

On Pleasant Island, Alaska, wolves are feasting on sea otters. That’s surprisingly bad news for deer.

by Marina Wang • 550 words / 2 mins

Could the Alaska Government Be on the Hook for Climate Refugees?

A proposed legal strategy could offer a way for those who’ve lost their land to climate change to be compensated.

by Isabella Kaminski • 1,200 words / 6 mins

Taking Down Mexico’s Totoaba Cartels Helps with Vaquita Conservation

Authorities in Mexico have dismantled cartels trafficking totoaba, a prized fish linked to the decline of endangered vaquita porpoises.

by Maxwell Radin • 450 words / 2 mins

In Graphic Detail: Gray Whales in Flux

The number of gray whales in the eastern North Pacific Ocean was a cause for celebration a few years ago. What happened?

by Marina Wang • 300 words / 1 min

The Great Quake and the Great Drowning

Mega-quakes have periodically rocked North America’s Pacific Northwest. Indigenous people told terrifying stories about the devastation but refused to leave.

by Ann Finkbeiner • 3,100 words / 15 mins • We’re sharing this story, originally published in 2015, as yesterday was the 323rd anniversary of the last mega-quake to hit the Pacific Northwest.

What We’re Reading

Meet a modern-day River Thames mudlarker. (Aeon)

The experiments of the start-up Make Sunsets, which proposes sending sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere via weather balloons in order to reflectively cool the atmosphere—and ultimately sell “cooling credits”—have been banned by Mexico’s Ministry of Natural Resources. But geoengineering researchers fear this incident will create a chilling effect on future research and could stall innovation. (MIT Technology Review)

Emperor penguins are the only penguins that breed on ice, and the loss of sea ice is particularly concerning for the population. So it was hopeful news that satellite images detected a new colony of about 500 birds in a remote and inaccessible region of Antarctica. (The Guardian)

Bottom trawling in New Zealand, with its significant by-catch problem, faces a reckoning. (New Zealand Geographic)

A good aquarium display can look effortless, but it takes a lot of planning and hard work to make it so. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at a deep-sea exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (vlogbrothers)

Sound on! Hello, baby elephant seal. A guardian at Race Rocks, an ecological reserve just off Victoria, British Columbia, captures the birth of an elephant seal on video. (Capital Daily)

Binge listen to our five-part podcast, The Sound Aquatic, on our site or subscribe now through your favorite podcast app.

Mirror, mirror, in the snow, who’s the prettiest penguin of them all? Self-recognition is considered a key indicator of animal intelligence. Using the mirror test—which dates back to studies in the 1970s with chimps—researchers assess an animal’s ability to observe its reflection. Wild Adélie penguins have recently passed this test, suggesting self-awareness. (“Penguins May Have Passed the Mirror Test”)

Scientists tend to think that wolf populations are closely tied to their ungulate prey—animals like deer and moose. But with sea otter populations rebounding along the Alaska coast, wolves are eating something other than deer. On Pleasant Island, Alaska, fluffy sea otters have boosted the wolf population so much that deer have been extirpated from the island. (“Sea Otter Recovery Is Sending Ripples through the Ecosystem”)

Kara Rising, a marine ecologist, has discovered that ship noises are an anti–Barry White for green crabs. To study this, she constructed female “crabs”: yellow sponges with toothpick legs doused in synthetic sex pheromones. “Sight is not the most important sense for the crabs when mating, but they do like a nice pair of gams,” she says. (“Ship Noise Kills Crabs’ Libidos”)

The idea that animals other than humans can use tools was first pondered in the 1960s when primatologist Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees using blades of grass to capture termites. Since then, other animals have been admitted into the tool-using crowd, but their tools have been tangible. Studies over the past few decades suggest that air, like a humpback’s bubbles, can be a tool, too. (“For Humpbacks, Bubbles Can Be Tools”)

It’s always important to be careful with the word discovery. That’s a lesson UNESCO and the French organization 1 Ocean learned the hard way after they claimed discovery of a coral reef in French Polynesia early last year—a reef many Tahitians were already well aware of, thank you very much. The blowback has included calls to ban the scientific team from returning to the reef. (“Discovering What is Already Known”)

In the final episode of the Hakai Institute’s video series Whale Bones, the young humpback arrives at his final resting place on Calvert Island, British Columbia, and Mike and his team get to work artfully rigging hundreds of kilograms of bones and steel high into the rafters. Three and a half years after washing ashore, this whale finally gets to share his story with the world, acting as both a warning call and a reminder of the glorious wonders of nature. (Video length: 9 mins 50 secs)

Reply to this email to send us questions, comments, or tips.
If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.