Preparing Sea Otter Pups to Live in the Wild - Megan Smylie
Sea Otter Program Manager, Aquarium of the Pacific
Megan Smylie is the Sea Otter Program Manager at the Aquarium of the Pacific. She coordinates the Sea Otter Surrogacy Program, a program aimed at rehabilitating orphaned sea otter pups and successfully reintroducing them back into the wild.
Video conversation with Megan … click here
What Megan talks about …
Megan talks about growing up near Long Beach and how the ocean has always been her happy place. Although she majored in psychology in college her knowledge of behavior modification has been very useful in working with marine mammals. She talks about the status of sea otters, their importance in the coastal community and why it is important to rehabilitate orphaned sea otter pups so they can be returned to the wild.
Show Notes
00:00:03 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Megan Smiley, the Sea Otter Program Manager at the Aquarium of the Pacific in California. Megan has worked in the field of animal care for nearly two decades. She is now involved in the Sea Otter Surrogacy Program. The program is aimed at rehabilitating rescued sea otter pups so they may be released back into the wild.
00:00:33 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artivists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with water. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect water and all the creatures that depend on it.
00:00:54 Pam Ferris-Olson I'm talking with Megan Smiley, the Aquarium of the Pacific's Sea Otter Program Manager. Megan has worked with a wide variety of marine species, including harbor seals, sea lions, and dolphins. The Sea Otter Surrogacy Program at the Aquarium of the Pacific prepares orphaned sea otter pups to be released back into the wild.
00:01:17 Pam Ferris-Olson Today, Megan will talk about the program and how she became involved with it. Welcome, Megan. I'm really looking forward to hearing about the surrogacy program and learning more about California sea otters.
00:01:31 Pam Ferris-Olson I have a special place in my heart for sea otters, as I did a master's thesis on them. I'm a bit jealous of your work at the aquarium and wish such a job had been available when I'd lived in California. I am sure your job isn't always glamorous, but I bet there are many heartwarming moments. Megan, let's start by talking about you and how you came to work with marine mammals. Where did you grow up and when did you become interested in marine mammals?
00:02:02 Megan Smylie That's a great question, Pam. Thank you for asking and thank you for having me. I grew up in Southern California, just a little south of Long Beach here. So I'm pretty close by to where I grew up, which is really exciting in a full circle moment. I first fell in love with marine mammals in the ocean when I began going to zoos and aquariums that were close by and seeing them up close. I was fortunate enough to live very close to the ocean and could take day trips there, where just being around it was impactful. It's still my happy place to this day. And so for as long as I can remember, I have loved marine mammals but the ocean as a whole. Marine mammals have a special place in my heart. They're just so charismatic and beautiful.
00:02:52 Pam Ferris-Olson So tell us, how were you able to leverage a degree in psychology into a job working with marine mammals?
00:02:59 Megan Smylie That's such a good question. I think oftentimes people are surprised that a psychology degree can kind of lead you down this path. Most people think that you have to have a marine biology degree to learn about this. And while that is helpful to learn about the ecology of these animals, I think that my strength and background comes into the behavior modification side of things. And so I had worked alongside marine mammals for a while.
00:03:26 Megan Smylie And actually, I had started that before I finished my degree and found that I absolutely loved behavior modification. A lot of the same techniques that are applied to humans is exactly how we work with marine mammals. And so the knowledge base really carried over very nicely. And then pairing that with hands-on animal experience, that was how I got started.
00:03:49 Pam Ferris-Olson So I've seen wild sea otters swimming outside the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is some 300 miles north of the Aquarium of the Pacific where you work. Does the range of the sea otter extend south to Long Beach where the Aquarium of the Pacific is located?
00:04:05 Megan Smylie That's a great question. Unfortunately, the existing range of the southern sea otter doesn't go much past Santa Barbara. In fact, there's an offshore island called San Nicolas Island. That is the southernmost population of southern sea otters at this time. And there's about 150 animals on that island kind of hanging out over there. But that is the most southern sea otters go at this time. And so we do not, unfortunately, have them off of our coast here. We have to go a few hours north to start seeing them.
00:04:40 Pam Ferris-Olson So what's the status of the sea otter? Is their status a factor in wanting to return arbor pups to the wild?
00:04:47 Megan Smylie Absolutely. So sea otters are listed as a threatened species and they have kind of stabilized a little and are hovering right around a 3,000 individual mark. And that number has been there for about seven or eight years. And really what we're finding is that the existing range is kind of at carrying capacity. And that's an interesting thing. So we are really trying to prioritize releasing these animals to help stabilize and hopefully grow naturally that population. So all of these stranded pups, because they are an endangered and threatened species, they have a recovery plan and our efforts alongside Monterey Bay Aquarium are helping to support that sea otter recovery action plan.
00:05:37 Pam Ferris-Olson So maybe you should tell us a little bit about sea otters. What is their role in California's coastal waters?
00:05:45 Megan Smylie Sea otters are an incredible animal. I think actually my favorite thing about a sea otter is the impact that they can have on an environment. They keep us busy all the time, but hands down my favorite thing is what they represent and, that is, really healthy ecosystems. Sea otters are what is called a keystone species where they are a top down predator that are foraging on other animals that help restore balance into that ecosystem.
00:06:13 Megan Smylie And so I think commonly people are often hearing about, you know, sea otters living kelp forests, and they can keep sea urchin populations in check, which then allows healthy kelp forests to grow. When you remove one of those things out of there, the whole system becomes imbalanced. And so when you remove the sea otter that's keeping the sea urchin population in check, the urchins are allowed to overpopulate, and they actually feed on the holdfast of the kelp, which is the bottom of the kelp that roots it down to the ground. And so when that holdfast is removed, the kelp floats away, and then the kelp forests basically become non-existent. That is one example of them becoming a keystone species, but they also have a very large impact in estuaries and seagrass beds.
00:07:03 Megan Smylie And so they're also preying on different crabs there and other invertebrates that are gonna help kind of keep those populations in check so that the plants can grow to a healthy level and at a healthy rate. Oftentimes when you remove otters from that system, you are removing that top-down predator. And those crabs and slug populations are allowed to overpopulate, and that really inhibits the growth of the seagrass beds. And so it's a very similar model, but those are the two ecosystems that sea otters can completely transform whether they are present.
00:07:37 Megan Smylie You have very robust, healthy, biodiverse ecosystems. When otters are not in those ecosystems, you start to find barren, very limited bioactivity in those spaces. And it's because the otters control kind of the middle of the food chain at a rapid rate.
00:07:58 Pam Ferris-Olson Well, thank you. That's a good description of the importance of sea otters. So now tell us what a surrogacy program is, and why it was thought that such an effort was needed for sea otters.
00:08:10 Megan Smylie Absolutely. So on average, every year between 10 and 15 sea otter pups are stranded. These pups are stranding in their existing range, which is most densely populated around the Monterey Bay area, a little bit north and a little bit south of that. And so most sea otters that strands end up, if they require care, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And what Monterey Bay Aquarium was doing since the 1980s was rehabilitating those animals and releasing them. And this was a very similar model to how you would rehabilitate other marine mammals for release.
00:08:47 Megan Smylie Oftentimes it included the human teaching a sea otter necessary skills. But what they started to find was that those populations could easily become habituated to people, which is problematic on release. But they also found that some of them had peculiar social skills, and that's because they were learning their social skills from people, not necessarily other otters. But what the field biologists started noticing at Monterey Bay Aquarium was that sometimes wild otters would adopt other pups and care for them and raise them as their own. And then those pups were very successful. So they decided, you know, we have this resident population of females. What if we pair our pups with those, those stranded pups with those, those females?
00:09:38 Megan Smylie And they were finding that it's quite instinctual for an adult female sea otter to adopt a pup that is not theirs. They will show it how to groom. They'll show how to forage, and very important and maybe less obvious, they'll show it how to socialize properly because they're learning cues from a sea otter, not from a human.
00:09:59 Megan Smylie And so in 2001, Monterey Bay Aquarium founded the Sea Otter Surrogacy Program. And what they have found is pretty remarkable data supporting that those otters that are rehabilitated under sea otter surrogacy are reproducing at normal rates comparative to the wild otters. They are not becoming habituated to people, and they're very successful after release relative to the otters that were being rehabilitated prior to that. And so it's a pretty amazing program. But what was limiting for them is the capacity. And the capacity has been a challenge for some time, because like I mentioned, 10 to 15 sea otters strands per year. But they really have capacity for four to five a year.
00:10:45 Megan Smylie And so what was happening is many of those otters were being either deemed non-releasable and housed at other zoos and aquariums, or they were unfortunately having to be euthanized because if they can't survive on their own, that is the most humane way to kind of address this challenge. And so the Aquarium of the Pacific here in Long Beach, we have been very fortunate. In 2019, we signed an agreement to become a partner with them in hopes to expand the capacity of that program and hopefully get a lot closer to that average 10 to 15 pups stranding a year. And so we got our infrastructure built, took a little while. There was a global pandemic sprinkled in the mix there, which slowed things down slightly. And then we received permitting in 2023.
00:11:38 Megan Smylie And in January of 2024, we received our first releasable pup to pair with one of our females and have not looked back yet. And so functionally, by adding the Aquarium of the Pacific, we've helped double the capacity of the sea otter surrogacy program and really get another step closer to being able to hopefully rehabilitate every sea otter pup that strands annually and put them back in the ocean, which will help maintain and hopefully encourage growth in their population.
00:12:10 Pam Ferris-Olson Okay, so your first phase of the program is to find an adult female to fill the role of surrogate. How do you locate a suitable female and what characteristics are you looking for?
00:12:23 Megan Smylie Looking for animals that indicate some sort of maternal instinct. And believe it or not, these females can show these maternal instincts even when they're not around pups. They do have an estrus cycle, which is not technically seasonal, but it is usually triggered in some environmental changes. And we're looking for them. Behaviors like towing a baby, where they would pull a baby up onto their chest and swim around with it, or food sharing, or in general, just really gentle behavior with younger animals. So those are some great indicators that a female could be a really good surrogate mom.
00:13:00 Megan Smylie And then once on site at either Monterey Bay Aquarium or here at the Aquarium of the Pacific, we do provide them opportunities to be exposed to the surrogacy paradigm where they might be with a mom and a pup that's already bonded and they get to watch those kinds of behaviors. Because just like other marine mammals, a lot of what they do is learned behavior and so providing opportunities to pair them together and expose them to some maternal instincts. Also, what we have found has made some really incredible moms.
00:13:34 Pam Ferris-Olson So if anybody is wondering what happened to those palm trees, we had some technical difficulties with Wi-fi. So Megan has moved, and I will ask her what sort of success the program has had at the Aquarium of the Pacific with releasing sea otter pups?
00:13:54 Megan Smylie Yeah, so we have had nine sea otter pups on site that have successfully completed the sea otter surrogacy portion of their rehab here. All nine of those animals have been transported back to Monterey and either released or are preparing for release this spring and summer.
00:14:11 Pam Ferris-Olson That's exciting, nine or 10.
00:14:13 Megan Smylie Yeah.
00:14:15 Pam Ferris-Olson So what would you like the public to know about the work that goes on beyond their view at the aquarium?
00:14:22 Megan Smylie I think what's pretty amazing is, you know, we're here almost around the clock caring for these animals. And everyone is working so hard to ensure the success that they stay on a release track and get put back into the ocean to help support the wild population. When I say around the clock, I mean almost all the way around the clock. And so our team works really hard. They are incredibly dedicated. It is not the most glamorous job. Often days we're feeding food and what goes in must also come out. And so you can infer kind of how what I mean there. But we are gathering food out of the pools. We're weighing, measuring. Tons of cleaning. They're busy little creatures, and so we're always providing enrichment opportunities for them.
00:15:15 Megan Smylie All of our enrichment in the Sea Otter Surrogacy Program is geared towards teaching them skills that will benefit them in the ocean. We make pretty complex foraging opportunities in their pools with clams, mussels, crabs, urchins, kelp. We vary the environmental parameters so that they are exposed to a number of different things so that when they're put back in the ocean, hopefully it's less of an environmental change for them. And so Monterey Aquarium does a lot of amazing work on that end as well, where they will go out and prior to an animal getting released, they can go collect native populations of food sources and pre-stock their habitat with that. And they have to forage on local species to where they're getting released so that it's not the first time that they see that specific species of crab or mussel or the way the food is presented is very realistic. So a ton of work is being done at both facilities to really do our best to come up with as many ways to prepare them back for the ocean and that they can be successful there.
00:16:27 Pam Ferris-Olson Okay, so at the end of each podcast, I ask my guests to offer advice on how listeners can make a difference. I'd like to hear from someone who is routinely connected to ocean creatures and the problems they face. What advice can you offer listeners on how they can make a difference?
00:16:46 Megan Smylie You know, I think oftentimes people assume that helping requires financial help and I don't agree with that statement. I think that anyone has something to offer and my biggest encouragement would be find something that inspires you about ocean health and ocean ecosystems or individual animals and just learn a little bit about them.
00:17:14 Megan Smylie For sea otters specifically, there's a number of ways that you can help them. Number one, some free and easy things are increase your education and your knowledge. Sea otters are particularly susceptible because they feed on a lot of filter feeders. They're particularly susceptible to high concentrations of chemicals in their food. And so finding ways that you can help protect watersheds where a lot of agricultural runoff can go into the ocean and accumulate in their food sources, that can become a really big problem for sea otters. Finding out ways to just help keep our oceans clean in general is going to help them because, again, they consume such a high volume of food that the more that they eat that is contaminated, the worse off that animal will be. I think other ways would be, there's some really cool projects out there happening where communities can kind of voice opinions on how can we integrate sea otters back into their historical range, which is much larger than their existing range. And how can we share those spaces with them? Because really, people and otters need to coexist in order to really ensure species survival.
00:18:34 Megan Smylie So this could be creative ways to help fishermen maintain their fishing practices but also helping sea otters live in that same area. Kind of making it a little more specific, we could go into increasing your knowledge visiting places like the Aquarium of the Pacific or Monterey Bay Aquarium and really supporting them. I think one thing that is surprising to a lot of people that I speak with is that these conservation programs are largely funded by guests coming to the aquarium and private donors. I think oftentimes people are assuming that we're getting a ton of grant funding, which is partially true, but most of these programs are funded completely by private donors and guests that are coming to the aquarium, which is an amazing way to support them.
00:19:27 Megan Smylie And so finding ways to engage in your community, respecting wildlife, knowing that everything you do on land gets eventually washed down to the ocean. So be mindful of your activities. No matter how far inland you are, you will impact the ocean in some way, shape or form. And so creating opportunities for more knowledge, I think, is the most impactful way. And then in addition to that, visit and support places that are actively doing conservation, especially as it relates to ocean health.
00:19:57 Pam Ferris-Olson Great advice. And I'm sure the Aquarium of the Pacific would love to get a donation specifically for the Sea Otter Rescue Program.
00:20:06 Pam Ferris-Olson So I'd like listeners to know that I've been speaking with Megan Smiley, Sea Otter Program Manager at the Aquarium of the Pacific. Megan is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com and YouTube. A transcript is available on womenmindthewater.com, and an audio-only version can be heard on iTunes and Spotify.
00:20:34 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for her use of her song, Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.