{"id":293650,"date":"2026-02-20T15:34:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T15:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/293650\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T15:34:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T15:34:10","slug":"he-approaches-slowly-filmmakers-built-a-robot-otter-and-released-it-into-the-alaskan-sea-what-it-saw-was-astonishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/293650\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHe approaches slowly.\u201d Filmmakers built a robot otter and released it into the Alaskan sea. What it saw was astonishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tool use was once believed to be exclusive to humans, but plenty of animals have since been seen using objects to help them forage for food, clean themselves and create shelter.<\/p>\n

One of these species is sea otters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While sea otters do eat fish, they prefer to eat clams, mussels and crabs. And as they spend most of their time floating in the water (even giving birth in it), they\u2019ve had to come up with an ingenious solution to cracking open tough shells.<\/p>\n

So, to capture this incredible behaviour, filmmakers and scientists teamed up to create a robotic \u2018Spy Sea Otter\u2019 camera for the BBC TV series Spy in the Wild.<\/p>\n

And when Spy Sea Otter is deployed in the Alaskan sea, it \u201capproaches slowly and soon captures some of the closest and most intimate views possible\u201d.<\/p>\n

A distance of at least 60 feet (or five kayak lengths)<\/a> is recommended if you encounter sea otters. However, with Spy Sea Otter, an otter quickly comes up to inspect it \u2013 and the spy seems to pass the test.<\/p>\n

\u201cFilming sea otters in Alaska was quite difficult,\u201d explained Matthew Gordon, one of the producers of Spy in the Wild, in a Reddit thread in collaboration with broadcaster PBS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only did our spy creature have to be waterproof, but we had to be sometimes over 1km away and we had to deal with small icebergs interfering with our transmitter signals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sea otters most commonly use rocks as anvils, resting it on their chest and cracking open shells against it. However, they have occasionally been observed using rocks as hammers. \u00a0<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s particularly special about sea otters is that they have specialised pouches of loose skin underneath their forearms. They often store a rock in these pouches, leading to the widespread belief that sea otters have a \u2018favourite rock\u2019 that they like to keep hold of.<\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s more likely that once they\u2019ve found a particularly effective rock, it\u2019s useful to keep hold of it, rather than diving to the seabed to find another. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Top image: a screenshot from a video filmed using Spy Sea Otter. Credit: John Downer Productions\/Getty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tool use was once believed to be exclusive to humans, but plenty of animals have since been seen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-293650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}