Apart from being lovable, sea otters and Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins percentage an ecological feat: Each species use equipment. Otters crack open snails with rocks, and dolphins lift cone-shaped sponges to give protection to their snouts whilst scavenging for rock living fish.
Researchers have connected instrument use in dolphins to a suite of variations in mitochondrial DNA — which passes from mom to offspring — suggesting that tool-use habits is also inherited. Biologist Katherine Ralls of the Smithsonian Establishment in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues appeared for the same development in otters off the California coast. The staff tracked nutrition (basically abalone, crab, mussels, clams, urchins or snails) and gear use within the wild and analyzed DNA from 197 particular person otters.
Otters that ate numerous hard-shelled snails — and used equipment maximum incessantly — hardly ever shared a commonplace development in mitochondrial DNA, nor have been they extra intently associated with different tool-users than some other otter within the inhabitants.
Not like dolphins, sea otters might all be predisposed to the usage of equipment as a result of their ancestors more than likely lived off mollusks, which required cracking open. On the other hand, trendy otters handiest soak up equipment when their nutrition calls for them, the researchers file March 21 in Biology Letters.
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