I'm not an expert on sea otter mating rituals but the actions displayed today definitely looked promising. There was flirting, what I think was scent marking, and at one point there was blatant submission with one otter lying on the ground waiting for a bit of attention. Looked like courtship to my untrained eye anyway...
Makes sense. Sea otters are quite popular and wherever I've seen them in captivity there's nearly always a crowd. However most facilities don't have room for very many otters, and given the ones in the states aren't allowed to breed to preserve spaces for any new unreleasable pups, I would think given the near maximum holdings situation here they'd be more willing to export a few to Europe to open spaces.
Honestly, I hope this ends with Prague's import of 1,3 because why would otherwise import them if they won't be able to breed them...
Well, it's worth noting that the Copenhagen population *have* been allowed to breed, being the progenitors of all other European tassies other than the new imports into Prague.....
Yes, but that is an entirely different situation to the devils which have left Australia since then, which have been exported specifically to free space for the disease-free breeding programme. Not saying that the Prague ones won't be allowed to be breeders, because I don't know, but that is not why devils are now being exported.
The second and third batches of Copenhagen tassies were sent out *after* the exports to the USA for that reason, however. And of course, if the plan is to free space for the breeding programme then allowing Copenhagen to send animals to more collections would be counter-intuitive - particularly in cases where they have sent new stock to collections which have lost their original ones, such as Pairi Daiza and Duisburg.
