Kit Goes to College Part One:
An Orphaned Otter
Morro Bay was quiet that chill January day—still enough for the beachcomber to hear shrill, frantic cries echoing over the water. Cell phones are handy things, and after a bit of telephone scrambling, she placed a call to the California Department of Fish and Game.
"I think there's an otter in trouble out here."
Biologist Mike Harris knows sea otters well, and he's collaborated in the past with the Monterey Bay Aquarium's innovative sea otter program. So when he responded to the call and discovered a sea otter pup—maybe five weeks old—stranded, and alone on the beach, he knew what to do.
First he tried reuniting the pup with the nearest group (or "raft") of sea otters—but no otter mother responded to the pup's anxious cries. Mike waited for a few hours, watching in the hope that the mother and pup had simply become separated. The orphan tried to climb onto other females in the raft, some with pups of their own, only to be pushed off. Mike knew something had happened to mom. Maybe she'd become a shark's dinner; maybe she'd succumbed to disease brought on by pollutants in the water. The important thing was that no mother could have resisted the piercing cries of the frightened otter pup.
The southern sea otter is a threatened species. There are fewer than 3,000 alive in the wild today, and they're found only along a short stretch of the California coast. (You can imagine how devastating an environmental disaster would be. An oil spill even a fraction of the massive BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would decimate California's wild sea otter population.)
The Aquarium's sea otter team handles stranded otters throughout the year, and returns sea otters to the wild once they're healthy and ready for release—but the number we can assist at any moment is limited. The pup Mike was bringing in was one of the youngest to have survived alone in the wild.
Could our team help her?
Next: Has the Orphaned Otter Found a Home?
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