A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
otter
An otter is a long-bodied member of the weasel family adapted to water, with webbed feet, a muscular tapering tail used as a rudder, and dense fur that traps a layer of air against the skin instead of relying on fat. Thirteen species range across every continent but Australia and Antarctica. Otters hunt by touch as much as by sight, using stiff sensitive whiskers to detect a fish moving in dark or muddy water.
Etymology
The word is Old English and is one of the oldest animal names in the language. Its relatives run right across Europe and beyond, and the same root is behind the Greek hydra, the water serpent of the Heracles story, so the otter and the hydra share an ancestor in a word that meant, simply, the water creature. The English word water is from the same family.
Notes
Sea otters have the densest fur of any animal, up to a million hairs per square inch, and they groom constantly because the insulation fails the moment it is fouled. They are also one of the clearest examples of a keystone species: By eating urchins, they keep the urchins from grazing out kelp forests.