There Otter Be a Way to Help : That’s What Motivates Workers Who Aid Orphaned Sea Mammals

April was sleeping in a shallow pool between two rocks when a little boy pointed down and shouted, “Look at that fish!”

Another boy tried to correct him, calling April a seal.

April would have none of that. She shot the boys a casual glance, rolled over as if to show the world that she was an otter, not a fish or a seal, and went back to sleep.

The sun had finally burned through the fog, the gray mist giving way to the sparkling Pacific. The patio above the Great Tide Pool at the Monterey Bay Aquarium had become a busy place.

But April, curled up in a puddle, was unfazed.

*

Sea otters often visit the waterfront exhibit at the popular aquarium on Cannery Row. But none seem as at home there as April, and for good reason.

April was raised there. “She’s definitely one of our success stories,” a proud Candice Tahara said.

As coordinator of the otter rescue-and-care program at the aquarium, which last week celebrated its 10th anniversary, Tahara works long hours behind the scenes. She and a small group of employees and volunteers act as surrogate mothers to young otters, giving stranded young pups another shot at life.

“With every one that comes in, we’re just giving them a second chance,” said Susan Rainville, whose responsibilities include swimming with pups and teaching them the ways of the wild. “We know that not all of them are going to survive, but we do what we can.”

April was 5 weeks old when she became separated from her mother during a fierce storm that hit the Central California coast during the spring of 1990.

She was found on the beach the next day, a quivering ball of fur crying for her mother. April got a new mother, or mothers, albeit human ones.

Stranded pups such as April--an otter is considered a pup until it is 12 weeks old--begin their new lives in the aquarium nursery. It is a room with a waterbed inside a giant crib and a 4 x 12-foot tank, 3 1/2 feet deep and full of rocks, sea urchins, sea stars and other critters common in Monterey Bay.

The surrogate mothers actually cuddle with the pups on the waterbed and feed them a vitamin-enriched liquid formula of clams, squid, fish oil and half-and-half until they are ready for the small tank, where they are reintroduced to their natural surroundings.

The tank is only a few feet deep because the young otters don’t yet have the strength to get their furry bodies to the bottom. 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.

The orphans are eventually moved to an outside tank and monitored before being scheduled for swims with their surrogates beyond aquarium walls. When they go out, they are tagged and fitted with radio transmitters so they can be tracked if they venture too far.

Sometimes visitors to the aquarium can watch from the patio as the swimmer dives for “prey,” and as the young otter tries to do the same, using all its might to dive deep enough to follow its “mother.”

She will teach it to use rocks to dislodge shellfish and to rest on its chest so it can use its paws to grasp the prey--usually shellfish--and crack it on the rock. The surrogate mother will sometimes stay in the water with the pup for three hours at a time. The maternal bond with the pup in the wild is a strong one, and the pup requires constant attention.

“In the last two years, we have really been increasing our efforts, spending more time out in the ocean with them, making longer swims and just trying, as swimmers, to increase our stamina underwater,” Rainville said.

Staff members were especially careful with April, watching over her in the tide pool for 45 days and nights, like a mother would a child in a swimming pool, before determining she could fend for herself.

“Just giving her the support of a mom,” said Linda Yingling, a nursery worker since 1988.

And, like any grown child, April still returns for an occasional visit.

*

Monterey Bay Aquarium is the only facility in the world with a program geared to rescuing and rehabilitating otter pups with the intention of returning them to the wild.

The sea otter as a species can certainly use the help.

The animals, which once had a worldwide population of 200,000-350,000 thriving along the Northern Pacific rim from Japan to Baja California, were prized for their fur and hunted down to about 2,000 in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sea otter pelts were one of the first California commodities sold outside the state. But by 1820, the animals had all but disappeared from our shores.

They were actually thought to have been exterminated until a colony of about 50 animals was discovered by scientists near Big Sur after the turn of the century. The otters became exposed to the public with the opening of California 1 in 1938.

The sea otter is now a federally “threatened” species and has begun to come back. Still, the California population has not come back as well as some had hoped, in part because of the low survival rate for pups--more than 40% die within four months of birth for a variety of reasons. There are about 2,400 otters in the state, all of them off the Central California coast.

“Our record as far as successful releases--and by successful I mean we know that they were able to survive and find their own food upon release--equals what occurs in the wild, which is about 50%,” Tahara said.

The staff has rescued 103 stranded otters in the last 10 years, 34 of which were returned to the wild. Every year, Tahara says, the staff learns more about getting more back into their natural environment.

A key, Tahara says, is to limit their contact with humans, to develop the maternal bond as quickly as possible and maintain it until the animal is capable of striking out on its own.

This puts an emotional twist into the work of the surrogate mothers.

“With a swimmer, there’s even a stronger bond than in the nursery because they have the ability to go off if they want to,” Rainville said. “And they do go off with wild otters, but then they come back to us.

“I once had an otter with a sea star (also called starfish) stuck on his chest, and he was far off in the bay, and he comes barreling in and he kind of just flipped over in front of me and, it was like he was screaming, ‘Get it off me.’ And as soon as I got it off, he just relaxed.”

That was a pup named Spanky. Spanky never did get the hang of catching his own food, though, and is now living at the New York Aquarium.

A pup named Riley would only swim with Rainville, and liked to play hide-and-seek with her.

“I don’t know if it was a game for him or what, but our swims were . . . I’d always lose him,” Rainville recalled. “And I’d have to come back to shore and then we’d get in our (skiff) and we’d go out and find him, they’d dump me out and I’d chase him back home.”

Finally, Rainville determined that Riley could make it on his own and refused to play the game; she didn’t give chase.

“He stuck around the aquarium for about a month and then he just kind of went,” Rainville said. “We never picked up his signal again.”

Yingling said it is impossible not to become emotionally involved with a young animal that has the same needs a human child has with its mother.

“For me, my magic moment comes when the little tiny pup crawls toward me instead of away from me on the waterbed,” Yingling said.

“I have adult children and I think raising them has helped me become a better sea otter mom because I’ve already sent my children to college and know they can survive. It’s the same feeling when the otter leaves. You know it’s ready and it can survive.”

But survival isn’t guaranteed.

Before they started naming otters, they gave them numbers. No. 1845 came into the program when he was 12 weeks old and soon earned his release. Three years later, he was found on the beach, fatally wounded by a great white shark.

“It was sad to find out that,” Tahara said. “Here was a male that we had given a second chance, and . . . It’s nature, but kind of sad that he hadn’t even reached sexual maturity.”

That kind of thing can be difficult to handle, Tahara said.

“I don’t even swim with them and I still get close to them,” she said. “And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a pup.

“There was one otter that came in and she was older--we named her Hazel--and she had something wrong with her back and we never did figure it out. (After her release) she kind of hung out in the tide pool with April and slept on the rocks with her. . . . And then she was found dead a while later and, I remember when I found out she died, I burst into tears. It was like, I don’t know, I seem to get attached to the ones that are like underdogs.”

*

Currently, the aquarium has two pups going through the program. One is a playful young male named Axel, who is living in a quarantine tank on the roof above the facility’s huge kelp-forest exhibit.

Axel seems happy enough being hand-fed and cared for by humans, which is good because it has been determined that he cannot forage for himself and will not be returned to the wild.

During a recent swim in the bay, Axel fled and was eventually tracked down.

“He had self-released prematurely and lost so much weight in the wild that we felt he did not have the skills to survive,” Tahara said. “Being that we could not form that bond with him, swim him to show him the skills, we felt like we would send him out there and he wouldn’t survive. And we felt that wasn’t responsible.”

But Axel’s tank-mate, Simon, despite being much smaller than other males of the same age, has demonstrated remarkable skills since being picked up recently from the rocks at nearby Moss Landing.

Simon is wary of all but his handlers and actually seems eager to get back to the bay. He is scheduled for release in a few weeks and the vast emerald forests of kelp will be his to rediscover.

Perhaps, like April, he will return to the tide pool for a visit.