Name: An Ocean On The Lake | Kiana the Sea Otter | ABC7 Chicago
Uploaded: 2025-01-20T16:35:36.000Z
Duration: 6 min 11 s
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Right now we have a sea otter who's undergoing chemotherapy.

She's got a lymphoid cancer, a lymphoma, and a chemotherapy treatment of a geriatric sea otter.

Advanced passive voice

Chemotherapy drugs, many of them, have to be given into a vein, into a main vein, and they're given regularly.

So in human medicine and even in companion animal medicine, oncologists are implanting little reservoirs under the skin which provide you access so that you don't have to put a catheter in every time, take it out.

We actually tried that with our otter, and as far as we know, that's the first time that was tried in an otter.

My name is Christy Sterling, and I am the supervisor of penguins and sea otters here in the Shedd Aquarium.

I don't know who doesn't think a sea otter is adorable, but I don't know if people know there's a lot more to them.

Sea otters are what you would call a keystone species.

Basically that means that in the food chain there's those sea otters, they eat the sea urchins, sea urchins eat the kelp forest.

So if sea otters were not in that equation, those sea urchins would decimate the kelp forest.

So they're super important for their ecosystem.

Sea otters are the only marine mammal that don't have blubber to keep them nice and insulated.

Instead, they really rely heavily on their very, very dense fur.

They have 750,000 to a million hairs per square inch, so it's very, very dense.

If you ever see an otter and it looks like they're itching or scratching themselves, they're probably working on separating those hairs.

Kiana was an orphaned otter pup that was orphaned in Alaska.

Just a year after I began volunteering, I got a call that they got an otter pup, and would I want a position taking care of an orphaned otter pup?

That was in 2005, so that was, wow, 16 years ago.

Sometimes I was here throughout the night taking care of an otter pup.

I knew her ever since I could pretty much hold her and feed her a bottle of formula made for pups, otter pups.

I think we've got a really good mutual trust.

I think I know her very well and I think she knows me very well.

It's been also great to see when any time new pups come in, she's usually one of the first ones that they meet because she's got a really nice, calm, docile demeanor.

So I like watching her interactions with all the other youngsters that come through.

One of her favorite things to do is probably give her a couple buckets of ice and she will be happy.

She'll park it and munch on the ice and groom.

She's pretty identifiable by her coloration.

Compared to the others, she likes to relax.

Sometimes she likes to go on deck and take a little nap, whereas our youngsters, they're young and they're super active.

They might want to be more active, doing the diving and things, but she likes to take her time.

Kiana, it was discovered that she had a lymphoma, which is a type of cancer.

So last year, Kiana's caretakers noticed a lump and they alerted the veterinary staff.

Shortly after, Kiana was diagnosed with lymphoma, which is a cancer of the lymph nodes.

So when she just felt like a slight little bump that hadn't been there before, we looked into it and that's what it soon was found out to be.

There are no formal studies in sea otters with lymphoma, so we worked closely with the oncologist at the Veterinary Specialty Center in Buffalo Grove to design a treatment plan that was right for her.

And that meant as few treatments as possible to decrease the number of treatments she received and also decrease the time that she spent away from the other otters here at S.H.E.D.

The other really unique thing about her treatment is that we put a port underneath her skin in her leg that allowed us constant access to her veins.

So this gave us the opportunity to administer chemotherapy in a place that was a little bit friendlier to her heart.

One great example of the amazing relationship between Kiana and her caretakers is that Kiana actually participates in her own medical care.

So for each time that she needs a procedure, she receives an injection of an anesthetic and that helps her go to sleep.

In order to do that, she actually voluntarily comes on deck for us and lets us give her that injection.

The goal for Kiana's therapy is to help her live a good quality of life for as long as possible.

Therefore, we probably know that this is not going to be a cure for her.

So her chemotherapy treatments are not necessarily as severe and she doesn't have a lot of the negative effects that you might see in other patients.

Kiana has completed her current course of chemotherapy.

We recently took her back to BSC in Buffalo Grove in order to perform more diagnostics.

And we're working closely not just with the specialists there, but with her care team to decide what is the best treatment for her moving forward.

Dogs that receive treatment for lymphoma tend to live around a year of age.

And she is coming upon 10 months after her diagnosis.

We just kind of hope on a day-to-day basis that she has the highest quality of life possible.

Everybody loves her so much, whether it's videos that we've shown about her on social media or how she curls up into a pile of ice.

People have seen her do it on exhibit as well.

So she is so beloved here and our team cares so much about her and we just want to make her as comfortable as possible.

Kiana is a really great ambassador for her species.

I don't know if people are aware that sea otters are endangered.

So they still need to recuperate and thrive again.

So it's really important to get people on board to care about sea otters.

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