more than just adorable animals, otters are the cornerstone of one very important ecosystem.

Otters are gardeners of the kelp forest. Their diet consists mainly of marine invertebrates

like sea urchins and abalone, which feed on kelp. Too many urchins means less kelp, and

that kelp provides food and shelter for hundreds of species.

Otters were nearly hunted to extinction before the 20th century, and the loss of kelp forests

threatened Pacific coastal ecosystems from Japan to Mexico. Thanks to decades of conservation

work, otter populations once as low as 50 individuals have recovered into the thousands.

Hannah, you have one of the coolest jobs at the aquarium I think.

I totally agree with you, I actually am a sea otter aquarist, is my official title.

But what that pretty much means is I take care of anything to do with the sea otters

at the aquarium.

And they pay you to do that?

I get an actual paycheck, I still can't believe it to be honest.

If you ever need an assistant, this guy!

Otters love to eat, consuming up to a quarter of their body weight in seafood every day,

because unlike other marine mammals, otters don't have blubber. They depend on their turbocharged

metabolism to keep warm.

So with our animals that are here in the exhibit, we feed them at least five times a day, with

added little snacks here and there. An otter can actually cost up to $16,000 just for food,

for one year, for one otter. They're very expensive to keep, actually.

But we're not allowed to give them shell on exhibit, because they will go and use that

natural behavior and go and pound it on the window, so we'll freeze some shrimp, which

is one of their favorite foods, in ice. They'll go over to the window, they'll pound it on

the window in order to get that food out.

They live in very very cold water, they don't have blubber like the seals and sea lions

do, they actually have this very, very thick coat.

On certain parts of their body they can have up to a million hairs per square inch.

So that's as much as we have on our entire head, they'll have in a square inch. You can

imagine it actually does create a lot of insulation for them.

Do these otters live here permanently?

Yeah, so the animals that are actually in the exhibit right now will always stay with

us in the exhibit setting. They all came to us as pups, they got separated

from mom somehow, they kind of didn't have another option.

But they play a very important role. Right now one of our exhibit animals is behind the

scenes and she's actually raising a pup right now, to then be released.

Historically, going back into the 80's and 90's we had a really difficult time successfully

rehabilitating and releasing stranded orphan sea otter pups.

We were able to keep them alive but when we released them they were too habituated to

people, and the main reason was because we were using humans as essentially the maternal

role model for these pups. In 2001, we began to experiment with the idea

of actually instead of humans, using female sea otters in that same role, as surrogates.

These aren't their pups, they didn't give birth to them, but they do adopt them as their

own?

Yeah, I mean this is really extraordinary. Initially the female will grab the pup and

put it on her chest and it may start towing it around, that'll progress into grooming

the pup. A critical behavior that we see frequently

is food sharing, so while the female is foraging she'll come back up to the surface and actually

pass food to the pup.

What we're doing is taking advantage of the innate maternal behavior of our exhibit female

sea otters. We have an orphaned sea otter who needs to learn the life skills necessary

to be a sea otter, and specifically we're looking for her teaching it how to groom properly,

also how to pick up food, how to get access to food inside of a hard shell, all those

life skills that are necessary, and then go out into the big blue and survive out there

in the real world.

We just looked at a really interesting animal, what was happening back there in that room?

That animal is 696, he came in as an orphaned pup and as given to one of our exhibit females

who raised it as a surrogate. Today was a very stressful day for the little

guy, it was weaning day, so we sedated him so we could do a really thorough physical

examination, make sure he's as healthy as he looks!

44.5, canine 6.8… 6.9.

This is pretty cool.

We look at the blood, we take a pretty robust blood sample, we also pull a couple of whiskers

to evaluate their stable isotopes. We pull some fur, we may look at that for

stress hormones down the road, and then a very large sample that just goes into the

library should there be a researcher in another 3, 5, 10 years who's interested in sea otters

in 2015 we've got some samples held back.

This is the softest thing I've ever felt in my life. You are adorable.

This is one of the few exposed areas where they're not covered in this dense fur, and

it's just so warm, you can feel the heat coming off of their feet.

This is amazing!

So, is that a healthy otter?

It's too early to tell, but I don't see anything to suggest otherwise.

The guy that we were working on today ultimately is gonna be released back to the wild. T

he only time we're handling the animals is actually when we're netting them and then

separating mother and do very brief health checks on the pup, so during that process

we wear latex gloves, hoods and capes to mask our human form and scent.

So it's really important that they don't get used to people because these are wild animals

and when they get back out in the wild we want them to stay that way.

Exactly, we don't want them to like us. We don't want them to associate food with us,

there's no advantage to liking people if you're out there in the wild as a sea otter.

So this otter is on its way to learning how to continue to be a wild animal and we hope

one day get released back into the wild. Good luck!

696's journey is far from over and like otters everywhere his future is still uncertain.

I've learned their population won't be saved one fuzzy face at a time, but he knowledge

gained by these hard-working scientists will give an entire ecosystem a better tomorrow.

I hope you've learned more about these otterly adorable creatures. Stay curious!