Before last month, Rey probably never pictured herself as anyone’s mom.
The young southern sea otter had her own rough start. She was found stranded in July 2023, when she was still a pup herself. After years in human care, experts decided she could not safely return to the wild.
Then came Sunny.
Sunny was about two weeks old when she was found orphaned and alone on Asilomar State Beach in February. Without help, she likely would not have survived. Instead, she was paired with Rey at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California.
The match worked almost immediately.
“Ray has far surpassed my expectations of what I thought was gonna happen,” said Megan Smylie, the aquarium’s sea otter program manager. “She’s fantastic.”
The two are part of a sea otter surrogacy program run with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which began the work in the 1990s. The Long Beach program launched in 2024 and pairs maternal-age female otters with orphaned pups that need a mother.
So far, Smylie said, the operation has rehabilitated and released nine otters into the wild, with three more expected to leave by summer.
But Rey and Sunny will not be among them. Both are too used to people and lack the survival instincts needed in the ocean. Their future is different: motherhood in captivity.
For Rey, that job has already started.
She has been teaching Sunny how to forage, play with shells and handle food. Staff watched the pair working with an imitation crab shell, the kind of small lesson that matters for an otter learning how to be an otter.
Sunny still has a pup’s problem: her fur is almost too good. Sea otters have the thickest coat of any mammal, with up to 1 million hairs per square inch. That fur traps air, keeps them warm and makes young pups so buoyant they struggle to dive.
Rey helps with the rest. She grooms Sunny, keeps her close, and when it is time to rest, pulls the pup to her chest and rolls onto her back.
The bond matters beyond one aquarium tank.
Southern sea otters were once hunted for their fur until their population collapsed. Today, California’s southern sea otter population has climbed back to about 3,000, but the species remains federally threatened. Pups still face low survival rates, parasites, shark attacks and human-caused disasters.
That makes surrogate mothers like Rey part of the species’ comeback story.
Sunny may never return to the ocean. But aquarium staff hope she may one day become a surrogate mother herself, helping another orphaned pup get the care she received.
“That is kind of a happy ending, if maybe a little bittersweet,” Smylie said.
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