What is a solar eclipse? A solar eclipse is when the sun is blocked by the moon causing the Earth to darken for some time until the moon is no longer in its path.
Not every place can see the solar eclipse as shown in the diagram, also some areas have different views. When Terry Fox Secondary was helping Doctor Adam HR, we had a great sight of the eclipse in Texas. The path of the eclipse was mainly in North America, starting in Mexico and ending in the north of Canada. Now in Texas me and my partner were studying two otters and a bear, I was in charge of the otters, for the baseline observations on 07/04/2024 the otters were very playful, they were swimming around and having fun with each other and the crowd around them. They seemed to also be a bit tired after a few hours of swimming and started to nap. Me and my partner found this interesting because they went to different spots in the habitat, the younger went into the closed-off building whereas the older went to the other side of the habitat where the sun was most located. This made us believe that the older otter was more of a show animal, it liked being the star of the show. All of these observations made my predictions pretty similar, it made me think that the otters would play for the first bit of the day otters then when the eclipse started they would go and sleep. However, my predictions were wrong. Not for the start of the day, however, the start of the day they were sleeping as we got to the zoo around 9:30 in the morning, should after around 10:30 the otters woke up. They began to play around with each other in the water, this is all that went on until around 11:50-12:10 roughly when the two otters started mating. Now, my partner, lead, and I were very confused by this act as they are both males, this caused us to ask the zoo keeper why this was happening, the zoo keeper said that it was a form of playing with each other and that it doesn’t ‘
happen that often so we believed it as caused by the Solar Eclipse. When the eclipse was at its maximum the otters started to get very anxious, they were pacing around and looking up at the sky; this caused me to focus on them a lot as they were running. Since they were running around at a fast speed I couldn’t tell the difference between the two but I believe the younger kept going into the water and trying to get far away from the other otter (believed to be the older otter). Soon after the eclipse was no longer at its maximum the otters began to calm down, they started to stop running and started to sleep on a log that was in the middle of the habitat. To conclude all of my points above, the otters tended to be very playful and entertained the crowd around them when in their normal routine but once the Solar Eclipse started they got a little anxious, very anxious once it got to its maximum totality slowly calming down as the totality went down to zero.