Meet the rescued sea otters of the Alaska SeaLife Center

Hey Jamie, I'm all set for an otter feed. Currently we have seven sea otters under our care. We've had some abandoned pups, we've had sick pups, we've had wounded pups. This is the most that we've had at the SeaLife Center. Seven is quite a lot. Typically we have about two or three at any given time and it is a very challenging job for a sea otter mom to take care of a pup. She's grooming it constantly, she's feeding it constantly. When they come to us we need to intervene as mom and we need to take over that role. Behind me we have Kesik and Atka. They were two of the first ones that we got. They came in mid-2015. We spend at least four to five training sessions a day working with them, getting them trained to learn manners basically, be nice, relaxed, calm. Sea otters, which is challenging for sea otters because they don't really understand the concept of being calm and being low energy because they're very high energetic animals. They're constantly moving to stay warm so asking them to stay still is a bit of a challenge. Five of our current otters right now are eating about five to seven pounds of food a day and that's a lot. That adds up very quickly because they're not eating cheap food. They're eating very nice clam and fish and squid but these guys are very mischievous, very curious. They investigate everything so if we don't give them things to do throughout the day they are going to do things themselves and they are going to have a lot of fun with their surroundings. They will unscrew things, they will pull drains up, they will play with their toys, they will play with the acrylic and if you give them something sharp they will write Keswick was here 2016. They're very very good at being sea otters. Our primary goal is to be able to release animals back to the wild but that's not always possible. So if an animal comes to us at a very young age, a sea otter pup that is, they are determined to be behaviorally non-releasable and we commit to finding them a permanent home. It's very hard for us to teach an otter all of the skills necessary to be an otter. Actually I like to be like the crazy aunt more than the mom, that's way more fun. They come in and it's go from the second they get here. It's round the clock care, it is bottle feeding, it is taking care of them, taking care of their coats, doing laundry, doing dishes, doing records, making sure they have the right medicines. Early on we're monitoring all kinds of parameters, blood glucose is a big one because we don't know exactly what's going on with them, we don't know what happened, how long they've been without mom, if they have any pre-existing health conditions and so monitoring a lot more things. Their body temperature, we're taking temperatures every few hours. They were pretty small when they got here, they were a week and two weeks old I believe when they got here. The little boy who is 16, 16 he's kind of in that very curious, wants to be a little bit more independent phase. The little girl is our only girl out of the seven otters that we have, she's the only girl so she's a bit of an oddity but very, very, very cute and both of them are doing very, very well. They're very stable which is great, they're still under 24-hour care and will be at least until six months of age. And all of these guys, all seven of them, as we don't house otters here permanently, are all destined to go somewhere and be ambassadors for their species in the best way possible and that's to teach other people who don't know about sea otters, who have never seen a sea otter, who will never have an opportunity to see a sea otter because they can't afford to come to Alaska or they can't afford to go to California where sea otters live, so we're sending them to a zoological facility to be those ambassadors. They're going to go teach people, they're going to go show people how cool these animals are and not only why we want to save them because of how cool they are, but just teaching them about why they are keystone species will help educate people on why we need to save these guys, not only for them but for the entire ecosystem that they live in.