KSBK - MONTEREY OTTER MOM ADOPTS ORPHAN
Excerpt: efore last month, a young southern sea otter named Rey would never have imagined she’d be a mother.
That changed when she met Sunny, a pup — about two weeks old — found orphaned and alone on Asilomar State Beach in February. The pairing went off without a hitch.
The two otters now live as mother and daughter at the Aquarium of the Pacific. They arrived at the facility last month, paired together as part of the facility’s surrogacy program that it runs alongside the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The program, created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the 1990s, was launched in Long Beach in 2024. It pairs maternal-age female otters with young, motherless pups who would otherwise not survive on their own in the wild.
Megan Smylie, the sea otter program manager, says the operation has since rehabilitated and released nine otters into the wild, with the three others expected to leave by the summer.
The two were seen manipulating an imitation crab shell and foraging for food. Young otters, because of the thickness and buoyancy of their fur, don’t have the strength to get their furry bodies to the bottom of the water tank.
Otters have the thickest coat of any mammal, with as many as a million hairs per square inch. The hairs trap air, which acts as insulation and helps keep the otters buoyant.