Alaska Fish & Wildlife News
September 2025
Marine Mammal Outreach Kits
Trove of resources reaches teachers
Holding a porpoise skull, feeling velvety otter fur, and walking the length of a sperm whale can be memorable learning opportunities. A new set of marine mammal kits will put polar bear hair, whale baleen and much more in the hands of young Alaskans and their teachers.
The kits are available in the Anchorage area as a resource for teachers. Three themes are covered: the Natural History of Marine Mammals, Pinnipeds of Alaska, and Cetaceans of Alaska. Resources are organized in a half-dozen large totes.
Kelsea Anthony spent months in an Anchorage warehouse sorting through mysterious skulls, baleen, hides, and other animal parts. The Wildlife Division has amassed this wealth of resources over decades. Many items are well-documented and packaged, collected by staff and stored; or donated and put aside for eventual use – once someone like Anthony could make them accessible in a proper context. Other items were salvaged, found or handed off under now-forgotten circumstances. Giving these cryptic items a purpose suits her just fine – an unlabeled marine mammal skull is a mystery to solve.
“I love spelunking in these freezers and storage bins,” she said. She’s been able to cross-reference items with partial or no information with clues and insights from other sources.
Anthony has a background in biology, ecology and archiving. One of her duties as a wildlife technician in the marine mammal program is to organize this hoard of biological treasures, and building these kits has been a perfect use for them. We met over Teams live video and she showed me skulls of animals I’d never even heard of as she caught me up on her work.
“A lot of different things have been unearthed over the years,” she said. “Things acquired decades ago by people long gone, even before the Endangered Species Act or the Marine Mammal Protection Act. There’s a ringed seal jaw that was collected in 1968. That one was properly wrapped up in bubble wrap in a drawer with other seal and sea lion jaws and skulls. It was once put there purposefully but forgotten.”
She opened a 75-gallon tote (Cetaceans of Alaska) and held up a harbor porpoise skull. “Notice they have peglike teeth, they’re not exactly sharp, but you wouldn’t want to be bitten by one,” she said. “They rip apart fish and prey. They are like the teeth of a comb. Very uniform.”
She showed me the skulls of a Cuvier beaked whale and a beluga. She’d found another beluga skull early on, unlabeled, and was unable to identify it until she cleaned it up and found this one and recognized the similarity. She also consulted with Link Olson and Aren Gundersun at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, and other marine mammal experts, to confirm identification and add details such as possible age and sex.
She showed me a Steininger’s whale skull. It had been languishing in a bin in the warehouse, she said. “It was packaged poorly, dirty and sticky, and I taught myself how to degrease and clean a skull. It doesn’t smell anymore. I’m much more comfortable touching it so I know teachers and kids will be comfortable handling it.”
An ivory-colored slab of grey whale baleen followed. Grey whales are the only ones with baleen this color, she said. She opened packages of polar bear hide and hair and sea otter fur. The tactile impact of the famously soft and dense sea otter fur is readily apparent, and polar bear hair is more a weirdly translucent yellow than white.
“When you feel the difference between sea otter fur and polar bear hair you can really understand how sea otters are the only marine mammal that don’t have blubber, they have this different adaptation for life in the water.”
The cetacean kit was inspired by existing kits in use by the wildlife education program. Outreach specialists with the wildlife division have developed a variety of kits for teachers with skulls, fur, casts of animal tracks, posters and guides. Anthony reached out to these specialists for advice and ideas, as well as biologists in other programs.
Wildlife biologists and technicians are often asked to share their expertise in schools or at events, and over the years many developed their own teaching resources. Anthony found an assortment of posters, educational games and activities created or used by staff in the past for demonstrations and presentations. When they moved on, their successors knew the value of the resources and saved them, but often there was no proper home for them.
One batch of found materials beautifully conveys the ecology of Cook Inlet beluga whales, animals that echolocate their prey in silty glacial water near one of the busiest ports in the world. There were no instructions, so Anthony tracked down Sue Goodglick, who had created the resources and knew by heart how to present them, and developed a guide to the materials.
“One of the things I love about outreach is the ideas are constantly building on each other,” Anthony said.
The kits put the animals in context with other animals, their environments and ecology. Adaptation is an overarching theme – how animals have adapted to the cold, to catching their prey, and to change.
“Some of the logic behind assembling the kits is the value of being able to compare animals rather than focus on a single animal,” Anthony said.
One activity helps students compare the lengths of various marine mammals – she’s bringing this and debuting other select materials from these kits to the Alaska Zoo for activities on Saturday, Sept. 13 for the annual Belugas Count event.
Anthony said the long-term goal is for the kits to have the kits live with the school district, but the exact location is to be determined. “We want them to be accessible and for the district to handle the checkout.” In the meantime, to check out a marine mammal kit email dfg.dwc.sealions@alaska.gov
The kits can be adapted for students from kindergarten through grade 12. Paper documents have been digitized, and the kits include drives with the PDFs for all the handouts and printable accessories, ranging from coloring books to maps and anatomy guides.
“These are things that teachers can take and run with,” Anthony said.
Other teaching kits from Wildlife Education specialists
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