Baby sea otter is reunited with mother in central California after dramatic rescue

It was a foggy October afternoon on the central California coast when the Marine Mammal Center got a call on their public hotline: there were distressed cries coming from the frigid waters in Morro Bay.

The center’s experts were able to determine that the calls — which sounded almost like a human baby screeching — were coming from a roughly 2-week-old sea otter pup that had been separated from its mother.

That could be deadly for young sea otters, according to Shayla Zink, who works at the center in Morro Bay.

“That pup is really relying on everything it learns from the mother to be able to survive in the ocean,” Zink said, adding that a mother sea otter cares for her pup for up to nine months, often carrying her small baby on her chest.

The employees at the center, with the help of the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol, jumped into action in what would be an hourslong journey.

First, they put the baby otter, who they named “Caterpillar,” into a safe container where it wouldn’t overheat. Then, they recorded the sound of the pup’s frantic cries.

The plan was to boat around the area blasting the sound of the baby through a Bluetooth speaker to attempt to lure the mother towards the boat. They used a recording because they were worried that the pup would get tired and stop screaming, leaving them without any way to let the mom know that her pup had been found.

It wouldn’t be easy, but it wasn’t the first time that a sea otter pup had been reunited with its mother that way — a similar technique had been used in 2019.

The center presides over marine mammals that live across approximately 600 miles (about 966 kilometers) of California coastline, but the small crew was determined, searching for two hours and playing the screeching cry nonstop, Zink said.

“Our intern had kept hitting play every once a minute,” she said. “I think we all went home and it was still playing over and over in our brains.”

Eventually, a female otter popped her head above water and followed the boat, which is behavior that Zink said wasn’t normal since otters typically only sleep, eat and groom their thick, furry coats — uninterested in humans on boats.

But this female otter was persistent, Zink said. Zink played the speaker on one side of the boat and then ran to play it on the other — and each time the otter followed her.

Eventually, once they felt certain that the otter was looking for her baby, the Zink lowered the pup into the water. Video shows the mother swimming over to her baby, who floats helplessly on its back. Eventually, the mom grabs her baby in her arms and appears to smell him, running her small hands over its dense fur.

“I definitely cried a bit,” Zink said.

The reunion has bigger significance to the region, where sea otters play a crucial role in maintaining the structural integrity of marshy banks and preserving biodiversity.

By the 1920s, sea otters were nearly wiped out by centuries of industrial-scale hunting for their fur pelts, decimating a global population that once stretched from Alaska to California, as well as into Russia and Japan.

Hunting bans and habitat restoration efforts helped southern sea otters recover some of their former range, but Zink said that there are still only roughly 3,000 southern sea otters located in the California region.

“It’s just a really special moment to be able to reunite this threatened species with its mother, because any and every individual in this population is so, so important to keeping it going and bringing it back from that threat status,” Zink said.