Brenda Ballachey, Ph.D.
is the project leader for the Sea Otter Oil Spill Studies Project for the National Biological Service. She studies the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on marine mammals, with special emphasis on sea otter populations.

Activity Booklet Contents

Activity Booklet is 32 pages.

Otters In Action
Observe and record sea otter behavior

Kelp Critter
Make a kelp forest community in your classroom

Fragile Waters
Learn about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and participate in oil investigation

Otter Smorgasbord
Investigate how much food a sea otter needs to eat.

Tracking Otters
Discover how scientist track sea otters.

New Wonders

Sea Otter Activity Example

 

 Biography

Complete biography is 13 pages and includes a glossary.

 

A brown furry sea otter the size of a collie dives

down into the clear blue water of Prince William Sound to search for food. Crabs, clams, sea urchins and mussels are all prey to sea otters in this beautiful wilderness in southern Alaska.

Overhead, sea gulls and bald eagles fly gracefully through the air. In the distance a whale emerges above the water's surface. Surrounding Prince William Sound are the majestic jagged snow-capped Chugach (pronounced Chew-gatch) Mountains, and beyond, to the south, the Pacific Ocean. Rocks, some the size of boulders, carve out a rough shoreline.

There on the rocks, fifty yards from where the sea otter dove for food, Brenda Ballachey, a wildlife biologist, peers through a telescope mounted on a tripod. She and a colleague, who both work for the U.S. government's National Biological Service, take turns watching and recording what they see. They spend the day observing the otters.

Sea otters stay underwater anywhere from 40 seconds to four minutes foraging for food and then surface. They roll over on their backs and float in the water, balancing their prey on their chests while they eat.

Brenda looks very carefully to see what type of food the sea otter found and how large the prey is. She also records how many prey an otter finds during a feeding session, and how long it took the otter to locate the prey during each dive.

Brenda's observations are part of a project the government is conducting to determine the effects a huge oil spill eight years ago had on sea life in the Alaska waters.

CD-ROM

Click on the picture to see an abbreviated version of the Sea Otter Biologist CD-ROM.

Sea Otter Biologist Video

Click on the picture to see an excerpt from the video.

"I grew up around cattle and horses. When I took the job here in Alaska and started working with sea otters, it was a very new environment for me. All of a sudden, I was in boats and we didn't have fences or gates in which we could close the animals in."

U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Brenda Ballachey travels Alaska's Prince William Sound to study the living habits and survival of sea otters following the catastrophic spill of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker. Brenda takes viewers on a research boat to observe otter behavior, then up in a plane to track the movement of otters using radio transmitters, and finally underwater where divers collect shellfish specimens. Brenda plots all her research data on computers, collaborates with other researchers, and mentors two women who are pursuing careers in marine biology.

Supplies in Kit

Permission is given to educators to reproduce these pages for classroom and training purposes only.