A friend of mine in the furry fandom once asked, “Why do people always draw otters as pirates?”
Probably, I said, because they live in the sea and they’re kinda rapey. Like that other favourite of hippies and teenage girls, dolphins, otters may look all cute and fetching and stuff, but, in reality, they’re a lot less endearing and mystical than the picture on young Bella’s dreamcatcher would suggest.
Dolphins are brutal: prone to pack-rape and murdering other animals for fun. Otters… well, let’s just say that interspecies necrophilia is among their less endearing habits.
Which makes a surfboard-stealing otter in California whimsical by comparison. Unless, of course, you’re a surfer dude being set upon by an aggressive otter with its eye on your board.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a few reports about the aggressive sea otter appeared last year. But the attacks have recently escalated. The five-year-old female sea otter, named Otter 841, has been hostile toward surfers. She forces them off their boards, which she steals, rides for a bit, and often damages with her powerful jaws.
“I was scared,” said Joon Lee, a beginner surfer attacked by Otter 841 last Sunday. “I was trying to swim away, but before I was able to get far, it bit my leash [a tether attaching a surfer to their board]. So I panicked.”
Lee managed to escape, but not before Otter 841 lunged at him and damaged his surfboard.
Obviously, surfing is not an evolutionary behaviour for otters. So, what’s spurring these acts of surfboard piracy?
Otter 841 is well-known to local otter experts. The New York Times reports that her mother was raised in captivity, released, then recaptured when she started climbing onto kayaks in search of food. During this second bout in captivity, she gave birth to Otter 841, who was raised by humans at the Monterey Bay Aquarium after she’d been weaned.
Hoping to release Otter 841 into the wild, her human handlers tried to prevent her from forming strong bonds with them. When they interacted with her, they wore masks and ponchos. Despite this, she seemed to quickly lose her fear of humans in the wild.
“After one year of being in the wild without issue, we started receiving reports of her interactions with surfers, kayakers, and paddle boarders,” [Jessica Fujii, the scientific and operational leader of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sea Otter Program] explained to The New York Times. “We do not know why this started. We have no evidence that she was fed. But it has persisted in the summers for the last couple of years.”
Because of this, wildlife officials have decided to recapture Otter 841.
Good luck with that. Emerging evidence suggests that otters may well be more intelligent even than dolphins. Like other smart-arses of the animal world – crows, for instance – otters have long-evolved, basic tool-using ability: using rocks to smash open clams.
“Due to the increasing public safety risk, a team from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Monterey Bay Aquarium trained in the capture and handling of sea otters has been deployed to attempt to capture and rehome her,” a spokesperson for the CDFW said in a statement […]
But Otter 841 has managed to avoid capture so far.
“She’s been quite talented at evading us,” Fujii told The New York Times.
All That’s Interesting
So, at least for the moment, California surfers should worry less about the dreaded shark fin, and keep a sharp eye out for a furry, whiskered face and a pair of mischievous, beady brown eyes.
Not to mention a mouth full of sharp teeth and an apparently insatiable lust to ride the waves.
