Olive the Otter
11/27/2009
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Olive the Sea otter/ |
In February, Maureen Hart and her family saw something in the distance on Sunset State beach in Santa Cruz. At first, they thought it was driftwood, but as they got closer they realized it was a young sea otter, its body covered in tarry oil. At first, it was mistakenly identified as a seal, so people from the Sausalito-based Marine Mammal Center went to the beach, but once they realized it was an otter, they brought her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the facility designated for stranded otters. The Aquarium stabilized her, and the next morning, she was transported to the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center (part of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network or OWCN, mentioned recently in the post about the recent Dubai Star oil spill in San Francisco Bay). Once there, veterinarian Dave Jessup used olive oil to soften the tar in the otter’s fur before washing her – hence her new name. No oil spill had occurred in the area at that time, so Jessup believes the otter grabbed a hold of a tar patty, a natural forming blob of coalesced oil that comes from natural oil seeps that arise on the ocean floor.
Olive was lethargic and weak when first rescued, but with love and care, Jessup and others cared for Olive and nursed her back to health. She made such a remarkable recovery that they released her back into the wild in April, close to the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill which happened on March 24, 1989, killing half a million birds, 5,000 to 6,000 sea otters, and many more fish and marine mammals.
Before they released her, biologists fitted Olive with distinct light blue toe tags to identify her, and a radio implant to track her movements. The transmitter revealed that during May, June, and July, Olive hung out a few thousand yards offshore between Sunset Beach, where she was found, and Manressa Beach. In August, someone stole the receiver, which had been on a hill above Sunset Beach receiving the regular transmissions about Olive’s whereabouts. The bad news is, they didn’t get the transmitter back – despite a no questions asked policy– but the good news is that Ben Weitzman, one of Olive’s caretakers at the marine center, found Olive in September. She was lounging in the kelp beds a couple miles north of her previous locale, cracking open a crab. And in the kelp beds were many other female otters with their babies on their bellies!
Olive the Otter now has over 1,600 fans on her Facebook Fan page, which the DFG maintain. California or southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis) are a federally listed threatened species, and the DFGs research over the past decade shows that, overall, they’re not faring so well. Around 2,800 southern sea otters live off the coast of California, having recovered slightly from an all-time low of around 40 to 60 individuals in the early 1900s but vastly reduced from their former glory, when there were up to one million in the region.
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