It was a foggy October afternoon on California’s central coast when staff at the Marine Mammal Center received an unusual call: someone in Morro Bay had heard cries coming from the cold water — cries that sounded eerily human.
According to the center, the sounds were coming from a roughly 2-week-old sea otter pup separated from its mother — a life-threatening situation for such a young animal.
“Mother sea otter cares for her pup for up to nine months, often carrying her small baby on her chest,” said Shayla Zink, who works at the center in Morro Bay.
With help from the Morro Bay Harbor Patrol, the team launched an hours long rescue effort.
They placed the pup, later named Caterpillar, into a secure container to keep it safe and recorded its frantic calls.
The plan: use a Bluetooth speaker to play the recording across the bay, hoping the mother would recognize the sound and come searching.
It was a long shot, but not a new one.
A similar technique had worked once before — in 2019.
For two hours, Zink and her team boated around the bay, broadcasting Caterpillar’s cries over and over.
“Our intern had kept hitting play every once a minute,” she said.
Then, a female otter surfaced and began following the boat — unusual behavior for a species that usually keeps its distance from people.
Each time Zink played the recording on one side of the boat and ran to the other, the otter followed.
Once they were confident the female was the mother, the team gently lowered Caterpillar into the water.
Video captured the emotional moment the mother swam over, scooped up her baby, and appeared to sniff and groom it.
“I definitely cried a bit,” Zink said.
The reunion carried greater meaning for conservationists.
Sea otters are considered a threatened species and play a vital role in coastal ecosystems, helping maintain marsh banks and biodiversity.
By the 1920s, the animals were nearly wiped out by fur hunting that devastated populations from Alaska to Japan.
Although southern sea otters have made a modest recovery, only about 3,000 remain along California’s coast.
“It’s just a really special moment to be able to reunite this threatened species with its mother,” Zink said. “Any and every individual in this population is so, so important to keeping it going and bringing it back from that threat status.”
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