By Rollo Ross and Jack Ferry
LONG BEACH, Calif. (Reuters) – Every year, about 10 to 15 sea otter pups are found stranded on the California coast, often due to storms that separate mother and pups.
The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach is partnering with the Monterey Bay Aquarium to pair pups with surrogate sea otter mothers in hopes of teaching them life skills and returning them to the wild.
As part of the program, the aquarium was able to successfully unite its first surrogate mother, named Ellie, and an as-yet-unnamed calf.
“This mom is going to teach them all the behaviors that we can’t teach them as people,” said Megan Smylie, sea otter program manager at the Aquarium of the Pacific.
“That adult female will start to imitate behaviors that the cub should learn, it will help them prepare, they will help them look for food, they will help teach them how to manipulate prey, how to open shells and anything else they need. knowing that humans are incapable of teaching them,” Smylie added.
California sea otters are a protected species. After being relentlessly hunted for their unique fur – they have the densest fur of any animal, with up to a million hairs per square inch (6.45 cm2) – they were thought to be extinct until a colony of 50 was found on the coast. of Big Sur in the 1930s.
Numbers now reach about 3,000, but more are needed, not only for the species’ survival but also to protect ecosystems near the California coast.
“They’re a critical type of predator in that system that keeps herbivores like sea urchins in check, so that sea urchins don’t overpopulate and destroy kelp forests and eel beds, for example,” said Brett Long , senior director of the Aquarium of the Pacific.
Seagrass and kelp ecosystems are credited with creating biodiversity, protecting against climate events and being a powerful tool in carbon sequestration, Smylie said.
Sea otters may be super cute and cuddly, but Long also says they are very territorial and are “just a wolverine in the water.”
And their eating habits are expensive, as they consume 25% of their body weight every day in restaurant-quality seafood. Therefore, a 20 kg (45 lb) otter eats 4.5 to 5.4 kg (10-12 lbs) of seafood per day.
This means that feeding an otter costs the aquarium $40,000 a year and requires constant fundraising.
The two aquariums rescued eight stranded hatchlings and hope other organizations can join the effort to increase the population in the wild and protect California’s coastal ecosystem.
“This is a greater purpose,” Long said. “This is a bigger challenge. So we invested and invested a lot, but now we all learn and appreciate, man, you see that juvenile otter survive in the wild. That’s amazing.”
(Reporting by Rollo Ross and Jack Ferry in Long Beach; Editing by Mary Milliken and Sandra Maler)
