– credit, Marine Mammal Center via Instagram

Conservationists recently reunited a mother otter with her baby and caught it on film.

It seems surreal when marine conservationists plop the lost baby sea otter into the frigid waters of Morro Bay in Central California.

Before it makes its way back into the arms of its mother, the thing just bobbed around like a crabbing buoy.

The story began when the Marine Mammal Center, which operates across roughly 600 miles of coastline got a call on its public hotline that there was a creature crying frantically in Morro Bay.

With the help of Morro Bay harbor patrol, a 4-person team got to work on what they assumed was a lost otter pup, because of the similarity in the sounds this marine mammal makes with a human baby.

It wasn’t long before they located the pup, which they named Caterpillar, but mother was nowhere in sight. Using a technique first performed in 2019, they recorded the sound of the pup’s cries, and then played it off the side of the boat via a Bluetooth speaker. The pup was put in a small container where it wouldn’t overheat or hurt itself.

“Our intern had kept hitting play every once a minute,” Shayla Zink, who works at the center in Morro Bay, told the Guardian. “I think we all went home and it was still playing over and over in our brains.”

For two hours, the team plied the coastline, blasting the call off of one side of the boat and then the other with no luck. Finally, a female otter popped her head above the water and began to take interest in the boat—something otters almost never do; they have no interest in people or boats typically.

The intern moved the speaker around the sides of the boat to see if the visitor would follow the sound: which it did, giving them the cue to throw man overboard overboard.

With up to 970,000 strands of hair per square inch, the sea otter’s fur is the densest of any animal. An air layer sits between the skin and the base of the fur that prevents any water from reaching it. It is, therefore, startlingly buoyant.

Lowering it gently into the water, it floated helplessly on its back, rolling around as if it were on a thick quilt. Mom swam over, grabbed the baby, and began to smell it rather intensely before swimming away, reunited with its pup.

“I definitely cried a bit,” Zink said.

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