An orphaned sea otter pup has found four surrogate mothers among SeaWorld’s animal care specialists. The female pup was hypoglycemic, lethargic and underweight when the Santa Barbara Marine Animal Center rescued her on July 21 on Jalama Beach north of Santa Barbara, according to Mark Bressler, a senior animal care specialist at SeaWorld.
Bressler is one of four specialists monitoring the pup in 12-hour shifts to ensure that she maintains a normal body temperature and weight.
“We basically have to take care of all the things that mom would take care of for [the pup], like temperature, weight and caloric intake,” Bressler said, in addition to feeding the pup every two hours. These duties mean the team must watch the pup around the clock.
“We dip her in water baths and then dry her coat out,” Bressler said. “She’s such a young pup, so she has a great coat for buoyancy, but that doesn’t protect her against the cold.”
Sea otter pups typically weigh from three to five pounds at birth, however the five-day-old pup weighed less than three pounds when she was rescued. She now weighs more than four pounds and will only grow as she transitions from being bottle-fed to the standard, adult otter’s diet of restaurant-quality clams, shrimp and crabs.
“It’s a fragile little thing, and [sea otter pups] are one of the most involved animals to take care of, because they rely so much on their mothers,” Bressler said.
According to Bressler, the SeaWorld specialists must act as substitutes for wild mothers, which typically carry their young on their chest to keep them warm, by grooming the pup and teaching her to groom herself. Bressler said that SeaWorld does not know why the pup’s mother abandoned her.
According to Lillian Carswell, the southern sea otter recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Much of the California coast has been heavily impacted by human activity. That said, there is no obvious connection between any human effects and how this pup was separated.”
Carswell said that the U.S. Department of Fish and Game is conducting research on disease in sea otters and other sources of sea otter mortality. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the sea otter a threatened species, which signals that world otter populations are closer to recovery than endangered species.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium, located near a natural sea otter habitat, typically rescues and rehabilitates stranded California sea otters through their surrogate-mother otter program, according to Carswell. However SeaWorld is caring for this pup at their Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation Complex while the Monterey Bay facilities are under construction.
The sea otter pup will remain at SeaWorld until she is healthy and may join three adult females in the aquatic park’s permanent otter exhibit. However, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will ultimately decide whether or not the pup is released back into the wild.
“It is very likely that the pup will remain captive for he rest of its life, and that is because it is very difficult to return an animal to the wild after it is ‘imprinted’ on humans,” Carswell said.
Human imprinting occurs when an animal handled by people loses its instinctive guardedness towards humans.
Carswell explained that because otter pups need constant care, orphans usually will not return to the wild unless they are raised by another adult female otter in a program like the one run by Monterey Bay Aquarium.
“This animal is a [threatened] species,” Bressler said, so SeaWorld’s first goal “is to keep her strong day by day and keep her moving.”
SeaWorld officials say they anticipate the pup’s future role as an ambassador to SeaWorld’s Sea Otter Awareness Week Sept. 23 to 29.
During this statewide awareness program, SeaWorld will feature their sea otters as they play with “otter-pops,” frozen tubes stuffed with clams and shrimp that the otter must break to get to the food, mimicking their natural behavior in the wild.