When the Marine Mammal Center received a call on its public hotline about a creature crying frantically in Morro Bay, Central California, a four person team with harbor patrol assistance quickly located what they suspected was a lost otter pup because the sounds this marine mammal makes are remarkably similar to a human baby. They named the distressed pup Caterpillar, but mother was nowhere in sight, so the team employed an innovative technique first performed in 2019 by recording the pup’s cries and playing them off the side of the boat via a Bluetooth speaker while keeping the baby safe in a small container. For two exhausting hours, the team plied the coastline blasting the call off one side of the boat and then the other with the intern hitting play every single minute, creating a sound that would echo in everyone’s brains long after they went home.
Finally, a female otter popped her head above the water and began taking interest in the boat, something otters almost never do since they typically have no interest in people or vessels at all. When the intern moved the speaker around the sides to test if she would follow the sound and she did, the team knew they had found mom and it was time to throw their little man overboard. With up to 970,000 strands of hair per square inch making sea otter fur the densest of any animal, an air layer between skin and fur base creates startling buoyancy that left Caterpillar floating helplessly on his back and rolling around as if on a thick quilt. Mom swam over, grabbed the baby, and began smelling it rather intensely before swimming away reunited with her pup in a moment so emotional that rescuer Shayla Zink admitted she definitely cried a bit watching the reunion unfold.
