California put 37 orphaned sea otters into a supposedly dead bay, hoping they might somehow survive. For fifteen years, the experiment seemed to vanish without a trace.
In 2002, the Monterey Bay Aquarium released an orphaned sea otter pup into Elkhorn Slough, a degraded California estuary north of Monterey Bay. The pup had been raised by a non-releasable female otter named Toola, who had adopted it inside the aquarium’s exhibit tank. Over the next 14 years, 36 more orphaned pups followed the same path. Stranded on California beaches, rescued within days of birth,…