The Story of Elwood: An Otterly Happy Ending & To the Rescue

Two stories from Michelle Staedler.

Sea otter mom and pup

Pt 1: What do you do with an orphaned sea otter pup who’s screaming at the top of his lungs? Why give him to a mom in the wild whose pup has just died, of course. Easier said than done, but Michelle, Sea Otter Program Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, has us on the edge of our seats as she attempts to do something that’s never been done before.

Pt 2: Michelle’s second story takes us to an abandoned cement structure in the surf off Cannery Row, where a mother sea otter is frantically swimming about. In wetsuits with salmon nets in tow, Michelle, sea otter Program Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and her colleague head out to see what the trouble is and find themselves in the surf in the unlikely position as pup rescuers.

MICHELLE STAEDLER is the Sea Otter Program Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where she oversees field research on wild otters. The work is conducted in conjunction with Aquarium partners UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, Cal Fish & Wildlife, and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), among others. The research coalition has done a variety of projects over the years, and Michelle coordinates those projects with the different groups, plus is responsible for getting volunteers and staff to follow along and look at the animals and help collect the data.

Over the last six months her work has expanded to include overseeing the otter animal-care component inside the Aquarium. That includes taking in rehab otters, otters of all ages and caring for them, whether they’re doing surrogacy with pups and raising the pups and returning them to the wild, or helping adults that need a little bit of R&R before they go back out into the wild. Michelle has a team of people that she oversees for both of those components.

Michelle was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up outside of Hartford in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the next town south. She went to high school there and lived in Wethersfield for 18 years, until she ended up moving around and traveling. She eventually ended up in California to go to school at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Always interested in tide pools and the ocean as a kid, Michelle applied to UCSC because it was close to the ocean and was kind of different in that courses were taken on a pass/fail basis with no grades. She focused on environmental studies, but was really interested in natural history and liked biology. However she knew she wasn’t going to be one of those people who sits behind a microscope and looks at things through the microscope all day.

Michelle really loved the bigger picture: like going to an area and seeing all the different species that interact in that area.  Understanding behavior was her main focus. Initially Michelle did some work on ground squirrels on campus. Then she worked on crab behavior – what they did underwater in tide pools. Michelle was always interested in marine life, but there was a posting on campus looking for volunteers to help with a new sea otter research project, which led her in the direction of her lifelong career.

Michelle was familiar with sea otters from her time in California, but growing up on the East Coast, they were a new species to her. She would see them along the coast here and thought that would be really cool to do some behavioral work on sea otters. So Michelle volunteered with that project, which was conducted by Dr. Jim Estes and Dr. Marianne Riedman.

That was about the time that the Aquarium started up. It opened to the public in 1984. Michelle started working for the Aquarium in 1985 doing a research project studying individual sea otters. It was one of the first studies to look at otters as individuals, as opposed to studying them at a population level, where the researchers put tags on them to tell them apart. One thing led to another, and Michelle has been working with sea otters ever since.

You can watch Michelle’s stories on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/CbEZ1MHqhd0

THE STORY OF ELWOOD, AN OTTERLY HAPPY ENDING

Probably one of the my most favorite sea otter stories happened one time when we were out doing sea otter captures. That involves quite a few people, including divers that go underwater using re-breathers instead of scuba gear. And we have a Wilson Trap* which is a special little basket we use to catch otters.

We were out catching otters for a specific research project so that we could tag them to identify them later on and record different behaviors about them. When we were out there one day, we saw a female swimming around at Lover’s Point, and she had a pup, but the pup was dead. Obviously, we were concerned about that and were trying to figure out what to do about it.

I think this was a Monday and on Saturday we had rescued a little male pup up in Santa Cruz. We were trying to get him to settle into the Aquarium and get used to our treatment and care without a mom. And, of course, he was having nothing to do with it. He was screaming at the top of his lungs. He was vocalizing. And we were trying to comfort him doing things that we would do back then which we don’t do now, like putting him on a waterbed,.

Eventually, it became clear the process wasn’t really working. So when we found the female with the dead pup that she was carrying around at Lover’s Point, I contacted one of the staff that worked with that orphaned otter, and I said, “Hey, I’ve got a really cool idea! Let’s see if we can put that otter with this mom. Let’s see if she can actually raise him, because she’s just primed to raise a pup and he’s just primed to find a mom.” The orphan pup was, of course, much bigger than the one that mom had lost, cause that one was lost pretty soon after birth.

So we said, ok, we’ll try it. It was late in the afternoon. We launched a small boat like you see over here. We put the otter in the boat. We had him in a little dog kennel that we usually use for transporting otters. And he was vocalizing at the top of his lungs, just screaming and screaming. He was not happy with the situation. We motored out on the boat down to Lover’s Point, and we sat there for a while, because a lot of times when females lose a pup, they will spend a bit of time vocalizing to try to reunite with it. They’ll wait for a response from the pup, but when the pup doesn’t respond, they’ll continue to vocalize.

So by bringing the orphan out there, when he started to vocalize, she actually heard him, and she called back. And so we were able to locate her, and we found her just swimming around. Actually, I take that back a little bit. Step back a little bit, because we did catch her earlier at one point, and the reason why we caught her was because the veterinarian at the time, Dr. Tom Williams, wanted to get a look at her pup to see if we could tell what happened and determine the cause of death. So we had ended up catching her and letting her go, but we took the dead pup.

So now she was swimming around and vocalizing, but when we got closer it was a little bit quiet. However, as soon as this otter pup started to vocalize, she responded very quickly, and we knew exactly where she was. “So great, this is great! Where is she?”  We saw her kind of swimming towards the boat. So we opened the kennel and we put the little pup in the water, and we kind of wished him luck. You know, we were hoping she was gonna grab onto him. She swam over, but then she kind of backed away, and he was lying there just screaming his heart out. You know, he was not a happy camper.

Then she just went away, quite a bit of distance away. It was already five o’clock, so we knew that it was time, and we were gonna have to go back in, but we weren’t about to leave him out there in the wild, because we knew he wouldn’t make it over night. He kind of drifted away from us, and we were just sitting back hoping that she would still come.

So we’re thinking, right, we need to go back. We’ll pick him up and bring him in. We quietly motored our boat over there, and just when we got to him, she popped up from under the water, grabbed him and took off with him.

We were just sitting there like, “Oh my God, this is awesome!” It was like our first adoption of an otter pup in the wild. We didn’t tag the female, but because we had spent a lot of time looking

*It was designed by Paul Wilson at Cal Fish & Wildlife.

at her facial features, her nose, her muzzle, we kind of knew what she looked like. And he was  definitely a little bigger than her recent pup was. So in that case, we were able to follow her for the next three months and actually watch her raise him, probably even to wean him successfully.

That was one of my favorite heart-warming stories. To think about how we actually helped unite this mom and pup together so they could go on and have a successful rearing and hopefully be another happy otter story out there, was very special.

We did name him. We actually don’t name most of our wild otters, but occasionally we do, and he was called Elwood.

TO THE RESCUE

Another story I have is a kind of a rescue situation, and this was in the really early days of the Aquarium. Down Cannery Row they still have a lot of remnants of some of the old structures here. And there was an art studio or something down the road, called Stowhands, I believe, and they were right on the water, and behind them and in the water was this big square remnant of some building. I don’t even know what it was.

We got a call from them and they said they had been hearing an otter vocalizing, and they could see this female swimming all around. And they wanted us to come and look at it cause they didn’t know what was going on.

So, another woman named Julie Highnor and I went out to look, and we kind of surmised by going up in the building and looking out that in this enclosed thing in the water there was a pup that had gotten stuck in there and the mom was outside.

Well, what had happened, we had pretty big swells that day. I’m sure the mom was feeding and the pup may have been feeding with her, and a big swell came and kind of washed over, but as the swell receded the pup dropped into this big opening, and the mom, you know, was left without her pup. But she knew it was there somewhere. So she kind of kept swimming around and calling and calling.

So we went out and we had our wetsuits on. We had salmon nets in our hands, and we scaled the side of this thing. I don’t know how I did it, but we did. We just climbed up and we sat on the rim of it and looked down, and there’s this little otter pup swimming around and he’s vocalizing, too. So we grabbed the dip net, and we tried to scoop – it was quite a ways down – and I think we were lucky enough that the tide was just right that we could still reach him.

So we manage to reach him. I got him in my net, and I was very carefully trying to move him over to the side, and then figured I’d lower him back down in the ocean. By the time we got this done, the water was like ten feet below us, and I didn’t want to drop him off in the water. Well, I’m so careful and I’m lifting, lifting, and he got his foot just on the edge of where I was sitting, and then he just propelled himself right up and out. And I’m like, oh no, he’s going to hit the rocks. Something’s gonna happen, but he propelled himself out and down below, and his mom was waiting there. And right after he got out, she grabbed him and then swam away with him.

We made the front page of the Monterey Herald! It was really kind of fun, ‘cause everybody was watching this little sea otter rescue, which was probably one of the more unique ones we’ve ever done.