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There was fog at midnight in October California When the Marine Mammal Center received a call on their public hotline: distressed screams were coming from the cold waters of Morro Gulf.
Experts at the center were able to determine that the call – which sounded almost like a human baby screaming – was coming from an approximately 2-week-old sea otter calf that had been separated from its mother.
According to Shayla Zink, who works at the center in Morro Bay, this could be fatal for young sea otters.
“That pup is really relying on everything he learned from his mother to survive in the ocean,” Zink said. A sea otter mother cares for her pup for up to nine months, often holding her tiny baby to her chest.
Center staff, with help from the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol, joined in on the one-hour trip.
First, they kept the baby beaver, whom they named “Kamla,” in a safe container where it won’t get too hot. Then, they recorded the sound of the puppy’s frantic crying.
The plan was to row the boat around the area while reciting the child’s voice through a Bluetooth Speaker to try to lure mother to the boat. They used a recording because they were worried that the puppy would get tired and stop yelling, leaving them with no way to tell the mother that her puppy had been found.
It won’t be easy, but it wasn’t the first time a sea otter baby was reunited with its mother in this way – a similar technique was used in 2019.
The center leads the marine mammals that live along about 600 miles (about 966 kilometers) of California coastline, but the small team stood firm, searching for two hours and continuing to bark, Zink said.
“Our intern was hitting play once every minute,” he said. “I think we all went home and it was still going over and over in our minds.”
Eventually, a female otter raised its head above the water and followed the boat, Zink said this behavior was not normal because otters usually only sleep, eat and groom their thick, furry coats – with no interest in humans on boats.
But this female otter was stubborn, Zink said. Zink played the speaker on one side of the boat and then ran to play it on the other side – and each time the otter followed him.
Finally, once he was sure the otter was looking for her cub, Zink lowered the pup into the water. The video shows the mother swimming near her baby, who is floating helplessly on her back. Eventually, the mother holds her baby in her arms and begins to sniff him, running her tiny hands through his thick hair.
“I definitely cried a little bit,” Zink said.
This reintroduction is of major importance to the region, where sea otters play a vital role in maintaining the structural integrity of marshy shores and conserving biodiversity.
By the 1920s, sea otters were nearly exterminated by centuries of industrial-scale hunting for their fur, decimating the once-expanding global population. alaska in California, as well as in Russia And Japan.
Hunting bans and habitat restoration efforts have helped southern sea otters reclaim some of their former range, but Zink said there are only about 3,000 southern sea otters still left in the California area.
“To be able to reunite this threatened species with its mother is a really special moment, because any individual in this population is so important to continuing to grow it and bringing it back from that threatened status,” Zink said.