Corky floats back home — Sea otter found on highway successfully treated and released

By Jenny Neyman

Photos courtesy of Alaska SeaLife Center. Corky the sea otter is released on the Homer Spit on Monday. He had been rescued Nov. 29 and rehabilitated at the center in Seward.

Redoubt Reporter

Why did the sea otter cross the road?

In this case, it was a 21.2-pound, 9-month-old male sea otter found at Mile 5 of the Kenai Spur Highway Highway. What he was doing there is anybody’s guess, but Tim Lebling, stranding coordinator at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, does know that the otter, named Corky, is healthy again and back where he belongs, having been released off the Homer Spit on Monday.

“We ended up at Land’s End (on the Homer Spit) and found ourselves at least five to 10 otters floating around that area foraging, so we knew that was going to be a good release location. And sure enough, Corky took off to the water. He spent zero time as soon as he left the cage. He was in there swimming and grooming and diving and doing everything an otter should do,” Lebling said.

Corky was found on the highway in poor condition Nov. 29. At first, SeaLife Center staff didn’t know what to think of the report.

“He was actually on the highway so when we got the call we thought, ‘OK, is this a river

SeaLife Center staff unload Corky form a truck in preparation for his release Monday.

otter or is it a sea otter?’ But U.S. Fish and Wildlife folks were there, so we knew at that point, ‘Yes, indeed, we have a sea otter on our hands,’” he said. “We went through the whole gamut of possibilities, could he have been picked up and dumped on the highway? We don’t think he was raised by anybody. A lot of the theories we ruled out.”

He was found not far from the Kenai River. Even though the spot Corky was found was about 12 miles upstream and the river was mostly frozen over at that point, Lebling said he thinks it’s most likely that Corky was sick, got disoriented and just wandered away from his normal habitat.

“We know that when animals get compromised it can affect their behavior and where they end up,” he said, mentioning killer whales found in the fresh-water Nushagak River in October, and a ribbon seal that turned up in the Palmer Hay Flats State Game Refuge.

Once biologists got Corky to the SeaLife center they determined he was in an advanced stage of renal failure and flushed him with fluids for 48 hours to get his kidneys working again. They also took blood samples to test for signs of a bacterial infection.

Valvular endocarditis is a virus striking sea otters that is thought to be the cause of

Corky heads into the surf. He immediately settled into foraging and grooming like any other healthy sea otter would.

upwards of 50, 60 to even 100 otter deaths a year in the Homer area. It is an inflammation in the innermost layer of tissue that lines the heart valves. Septicemia, a bacteria found in the blood, is thought to be the earliest stage of the process leading to the infection. Juvenile males appear to be the heaviest hit by it.

Corky was at risk of having the virus, and a blood test revealed he did indeed show signs of the bacterial infection in his blood.

“The next process of the whole CSI figuring out what to do and how to treat him was to get his heart valves checked out,” Lebling said.

A veterinarian from Anchorage came to Seward to examine Corky, did ultrasound testing on his heart and found his heart valves showed no signs of lesions. He was given injections of antibiotics for two weeks, was tested again and given a clean bill of health.

“At that point we had some really good hope that he could be a good release candidate,” Lebling said.

Rescuing and releasing sea otters is a rare event for the SeaLife Center — Corky is only the fourth in 12 years.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time when we get calls about otters, it’s too late. Typically otters will come to shore to die, so when we get otters they are so compromised or so far gone that reversing them and trying to get them back around is definitely challenging,” Lebling said.

But Corky was the perfect mix of having a treatable condition and being old enough and experienced enough to survive on his own.

“This guy really saved his own life by the fact that he was foraging on his own and grooming. Those are two things that adult otters need to do around the clock, and we can’t necessarily do tube feeding or groom an otter that is full-sized with teeth that work, so the fact that he was doing all this on his own really gave us a chance to treat him. There were a lot of ducks that had to line up and definitely all the stars aligned for this guy,” Lebling said.

With the bacterial infection cleared up before it could progress to the point of affecting his heart, Lebling said he thinks Corky has an excellent chance of survival. Corky was microchipped and had teal-and pink-colored tags attached to his rear flippers so that he can be identified in the wild. The SeaLife Center is asking anyone seeing Corky with his flipper tags to report the sightings.

“We’re asking people, if they do see him swimming around, to definitely give us a call. We’re hoping, in an ideal world, for the next months to years to come we would continue to get reports of him swimming around and foraging and doing what otters should do in the Homer area,” Lebling said.

Beyond this being a happy ending for Corky, his rescue, treatment and release provides a little more insight into the epidemic of otter deaths in Kachemak Bay. Not much is known about the bacteria.

“That’s been our biggest mystery, and why this case is so kind of huge and somewhat historical for us, is the fact that we have no idea how this bacteria is being transmitted. We don’t know if it’s coming from the food, we don’t know if it’s coming from other otters, if it’s coming from something in the water. There’s been lots and lots of money and lots and lots of effort and time in the last five to six years put into this syndrome, and really driving a lot of us crazy for the fact that we don’t know the answer,” Lebling said.

Corky’s experience shows the infection can be successfully treated with antibiotics, at least if caught before it advances to valvular endocarditis. That isn’t realistic as a large-scale response to the bacterial outbreak, Lebling said, but every little bit of information is useful.

“In an ideal, picture-perfect world we could go out and capture all the otters and test them and treat them,” he said. “But it does give us a little bit of insight, as far as anything we can learn from this otter not only supports our mission statement at the SeaLife Center, but it definitely helps us with learning a little bit more, so if this guy continues to survive and we get reports of him for the years to come, then at least we know that it is treatable. So that’s why this case definitely is a landmark in this whole syndrome, with the fact that we know a little bit more today than we did yesterday.”

The SeaLife Center operates a 24-hour hotline for the public to report stranded marine mammals or birds, and encourages people who think they may have found a stranded or sick animal to call 1-888-774-SEAL. People should not touch or approach marine mammals, as it is a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. A flyer with information about Corky and how to report sightings of him is available on the center’s Facebook page.