The one of the newest residents at SeaWorld in San Diego weighs 10 pounds, naps in a crib and devours clams and shrimp.
But Cinder, a sea otter pup, almost didn’t make it.
In early September, a fisherman in the remote city of Homer, Alaska, found the baby otter floundering in the waves. No mom in sight.
Otters — known to hold hands in the water and keep pups close to their chests — teach their young to feed and swim. But the orphaned pup was left helpless until the fisherman alerted a local rescue crew which came to her aid. The pup was then stabilized at the Alaska SeaLife Center and transported to SeaWorld for permanent care.
“She was in distress and she needed to be rescued,” says Bill Hoffman, who is assisting in the pup’s round-the-clock care. “But she is doing extremely well. She’s putting on weight, she’s eating solid food, her calorie intake is up and she gains about a hundred grams per day.”
Cinder — the namesake of a river in Alaska — is the fifth otter at SeaWorld, but she has plenty of learning to do before she meets her four companions. For now, she’s working on “toddler” skills, such as swimming and eating.
Her days are spent playing with abalone shells and plastic toys in a nursery pool, filled with 14 inches of chilled, filtered seawater and naps in a side unit, which doubles as a crib. “She’s being introduced to different objects in the pool and being taught how to eat on her back,” says Hoffman.
As for her seafood tastes, “Otters have one of the richest, most expensive diets that you can imagine. It’s clams, mussels, shrimp, crab — all the good stuff,” notes Hoffman. (Still a baby, she’s being fed a special formula of ground clams and added nutrients.)
Meanwhile, she’s still getting used to her new life. “She wakes up screaming from a nap, and in otter language that means, ‘I need something,’ ” says Hoffman. “If she’s in the water, she might want to get out and groom herself. If she’s sound asleep and she wakes up, she might have to go to the bathroom or might need more food.”
Cinder is in the critical period where she bonds with her caregivers, whom she looks to for her every need.
This also means she’ll never return to the wild. According to Dave Koontz, SeaWorld’s director of communications, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deemed Cinder unfit for release “because she’s being hand-raised by her surrogate family — she would not be able to return to the wild and survive on her own.”
Cinder’s rescue comes at a time when otters face threats such as oil spills and toxoplasmosis gondii, a microorganism found in cat feces.
“Runoff goes into the water and enters their food source, which is primarily filter feeders like clams and mussels, and then the otters get that. It can lead to lethal brain lesions,” says Hoffman.
To keep otters safe, he cautions cat owners to never flush litter or let it near a storm drain.
According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Geological Survey, the California southern sea otter population is down to just 2,962 in 2019, marking a third year of decline for the species.
Otters are critical to the health of their marine environment.
“Otters prey on a wide variety of food, and one of their main courses is sea urchins, which contribute to the degradation of the kelp forest because urchins eat kelp,” says Hoffman. “Otters, if they keep the sea urchins in check, make a much healthier kelp forest, which is good for a variety of species and helps contribute to a healthier ocean.”
She may be far from home, but Cinder is slowly becoming acclimated to her new life.
“It’s a little bit warmer here than it is in Alaska,” Hoffman admits. “We have chilled water — 55 degrees. We have an air-conditioned nursery around 60 degrees, and then we slowly transition. Just like we humans would get used to a different climate over a period of time, she will adjust and adapt.”
Once she’s shed her thick otter pup coat and becomes more buoyant, Cinder will enter a deeper pool and be introduced to the other otters, which are rescues as well.
For now, visitors to the park can peer inside her pool through windows and watch her nibble on a snack or try diving for shells.
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