Hello From The Otter Side

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At one time, sea otters had an enormous historical range—from Baja California, up the West Coast, through Alaska, Russia, and Japan. But these days, their levels are low. In this episode, we get an inside look at a groundbreaking program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is helping to reverse that by getting rescued sea otter pups back to the wild. We produced this episode in partnership with the aquarium. To learn more about the program or get info on visiting, visit https://www.montereybayaquarium.org.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's May of 2023 off the coast of Monterey, California. The Sea Otter Rescue Team at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium gets an emergency phone call.
0:14.0	A baby sea otter, a pup, has been spotted crying on the beach all alone.
0:20.4	The pup is a female and she's very young, maybe just a week old.
0:24.0	Newborn pups, you know, they're only two pounds, five pounds of weight, so they are pretty small.
0:31.0	The first thing we try to do is find her mother in the wild and reunite them.
0:37.0	If we can make that happen, that is definitely the best outcome.
0:41.0	In this case, we couldn't find a female in the area that looked like
0:46.8	she was looking for her pop. It's unclear exactly why this stranding occurred.
0:52.4	If something happened to mom, if the two got separated, in this
0:56.6	case they don't know. But one thing is clear. With a pup, they're so dependent on their mother that they wouldn't be able to survive on their own.
1:06.7	So this Otter pup is given a number 956 in order to be able to return to the wild someday,
1:13.5	956 will need to learn how to groom, how to feed,
1:17.2	how to socialize.
1:19.3	Essentially, how to be a sea otter.
1:22.3	And that is something that human caretakers can't really teach her.
1:28.1	Luckily, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium has a solution.
1:37.4	I'm doingoolan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today in
1:41.8	partnership with the Monterey Bayarium, we are getting an inside look at their
1:46.0	groundbreaking Sea Otter Sergacy program.
1:49.4	It's like bringing up baby, otter baby style.
1:55.3	Hello from the otter side!
2:00.3	After this. When they're not able to eat solid food yet they're not really able to groom themselves yet
	...

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