Monterey Bay Sea Otters
— — a small body asleep, anchored in the kelp.
Not only on a wall.
“The southern sea otter, twice almost gone from this coast and twice come back. From the breakwater above Cannery Row you can watch them work the kelp at the edge of the bay, diving for urchins, surfacing on their backs to crack a shell on a stone they keep tucked in their fur. At Elkhorn Slough, twenty miles north, mothers and pups raft together in the channel, holding hands while they sleep so the tide doesn't take them apart. The kelp forest exists because the otters do.
Monterey Bay Sea Otters, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Monterey Bay opens into the Pacific along California's central coast, roughly 120 miles south of San Francisco, between Santa Cruz at its northern hook and Pacific Grove at its southern. Beneath its surface lies the Monterey Submarine Canyon, a chasm nearly two miles deep that drives nutrient-rich upwelling along the continental shelf and feeds the dense giant-kelp forests offshore. In 1992 the federal government designated the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, at roughly 6,094 square miles one of the largest protected coastal marine areas in the United States. The southern sea otter (Enhydra lutris nereis) lives in the bay's nearshore kelp, a thin ribbon of habitat hugging the coast from Año Nuevo down to Point Sur.
The kelp forest is the otter's house and the otter is its keeper. Without sea otters, the bay's sea urchins multiply unchecked and graze the holdfasts of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) down to bare rock, a state ecologists call an urchin barren. With otters present, urchin populations stay low and the kelp can rise sixty feet from the seabed to the surface, where it forms the canopy that shelters rockfish, harbour seals, and the otters themselves. A single adult otter eats roughly twenty-five percent of its body weight in shellfish every day to fuel its metabolism in cold water. The densest fur of any mammal, around a million hairs per square inch, is what keeps the body warm enough to dive.
There are three reliable places to watch sea otters in Monterey Bay. The Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row, opened in 1984, runs a Sea Otter Program that has rescued and released hundreds of stranded pups, and the bay-side exhibit window often shows wild otters surfacing in the kelp tank just outside the building. Elkhorn Slough, a seven-mile tidal estuary near Moss Landing about twenty miles up the coast, holds one of the densest rafts of southern sea otters in the world and can be kayaked from the slough's mouth. Closer in, the breakwater at the end of Cannery Row and the rocks off Lover's Point in Pacific Grove are free public vantages where otters work the kelp through most of the year.