Name: Q&A: Meet the Patients at the Rescue Centre
Uploaded: 2025-02-19T16:09:36.000Z
Duration: 30 min 30 s
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Hi everyone, my name is Kendra and I'm one of the registered veterinary technologists here at the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre.

Today we're going to take you around, show you some of our patients and answer some of your questions.

So with me I have Dr. Marty Helena and he is going to take us through to our newest patient, to our newest sea otter patient, Tofino and we'll answer some of your questions.

Hey everybody, good morning and thanks for joining us.

Yeah, let's have a look at the start of the show.

Going into our, well what usually is our hospital treatment area, surgery, but has now been converted into the domain of, where is Herb Royal Highness Tofino, who's under 24-hour care still.

Looks like she just came out of the pool.

Emily here, our assistant manager here at the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Centre is doing the fluff and puff.

Super important for these guys, our sea otters have a perfect hair coat and we have our own team of professional hair coat developers here and Emily is one of the leaders of that.

So Tofino just came out of the pool as I said.

That hair coat needs to be perfect as I said.

You can see she's starting to help us, which is awesome, right?

So she's starting to work that hair coat on her own.

She's starting to blow air into the hair coat, puff it up.

Normally these guys have essentially a dry coat or a dry suit on all the time, right?

So the hair is so close together that water actually doesn't touch their skin.

So yeah, do we have any questions from out there?

Yeah, looks like, how old do we think Tofino is?

Well, we think she's about six weeks of age.

Normally these guys would spend almost six months with their mom.

She's eating a lot, probably 25 to 35% of her body weight in formula every day.

Marty, can you tell us how sea otter pups keep their coats dry in the wild?

So in the wild, sea otter pups rely 100% on mom to keep their coat perfect.

So they don't have quite the dexterity and the flexibility.

They have this really, really puffy kind of sea otter pup coat as well.

Mom's doing a lot of that grooming for them.

Blowing air under that hair coat, fluffing it up, and keeping it perfect.

At what age will she get a more adult coat?

I think most often we see them start getting that hair coat at about two months of age.

By three, it's pretty much an adult dark coat that you might be more familiar with.

Someone would like to know if they would get an infection of any type if water does get to their skin.

Not so much of an infection if it's just water.

But what happens is they'll lose insulation very quickly.

It's been estimated even if they lose 5% of their hair coat, they will not be able to thermoregulate in cold ocean water.

Someone would like to know is she as soft as she looks or do otters have more of a horse fur?

She actually feels like a sandpaper spiky.

No, she is probably softer than you actually think.

These guys have just about the densest hair coat out of any species.

What is she currently eating and how often?

She is eating for the most part a specialized sea otter formula that is based on a commercial carnivore replacer, so something that might be fed to other types of carnivores that might be orphans like wolves or raccoons, that kind of thing.

But we do modify that quite a bit, essentially adding a lot more oil to it and some essential nutrients as well, vitamins, minerals.

However, she is starting to wean on us to a certain extent, so she is eating some clam as well just as a supplement and she loves it.

There's a couple questions in regards to her swimming and her diving.

I know last time she was still kind of leaning to one side and getting a little bit waterlogged, so how's that going?

So she's a puppy and she's not able to really do everything as yet, but she's trying hard and certainly she's starting to get that sea otter flip, I call it, where they kind of dive and then put their hind flippers up and really push down.

She's starting to get it, not awesome yet.

Next question is here, how much does she sleep right now?

So she's on about a three, three and a half hour cycle right now and out of that, so getting fed about every three, three and a half hours, and I would say out of that she's sleeping almost half the time, at least a third of the time.

I think we've got quite a few Joey fans on here, so a lot of people are wondering what her chances of release are or would she potentially go to the aquarium or an aquarium?

Well, right now she's Canada's Animal, so she's under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans and we work under license from them.

We're in charge of her medical and husbandry care, but any determination on releasability is made by them.

And historically, unfortunately, because of all this intensive kind of care that the otter needs, because of all the things that she'd normally learn from her mom, like where to forage, how to forage, how to use tools, what kind of food to eat and how to escape predators, we can't teach that.

So historically, dependent pups of this age have not been considered super great release candidates.

However, there are some super great homes for these guys, and obviously the Vancouver Aquarium is one of those.

We currently have eight sea otters in our facility.

All of them have started out life as an orphan pup somewhere in the Pacific.

And actually, she doesn't smell hardly of anything.

And the reason for that, or a large reason for that, is these guys are a mustelid, so that means that they're related to things like weasels and mink and river otters and skunks even.

So species that we actually associate with real heavy smells, because they have these must plants, but sea otters are the only members of that group of animals that doesn't have a scent plant.

It makes no sense to have that, so you don't want to get any kind of oil on their fur, but really rely on that.

There's the perfect oil we can with that.

And there's no need to mark in the ocean, because it'll just go away.

I think mostly my fingers seem to be a favorite to chew on.

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Q&A: Meet the Patients at the Rescue Centre

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