Dr. Chris J. Law

Yeah.

And in terms of the males, oh, yeah, those guys don't do anything.

Basically, the males are constantly circling females because once that pup leaves, it's going to go, you know, reproduce to pass off its genes.

And then once that happens, I mean, it's a terrifying show that, I mean, I'm happy to describe it.

So normally once that female is free, the male would get on it and it's essentially where the male will bite onto the female's nose.

So often you'll see females with ripped noses and you can easily tell that's a female just because it's biting down on that nose and basically forcing itself on it to pass its genes.

So once that happens, the male just leaves and you'll probably never see the female ever again.

I don't think so.

And yeah, and also the females are much smaller than than the males.

So they're kind of defenseless in that regard.

I know.

If only they could.

Like I said, basically, that's the theme of life.

And they do this for maybe like 12, 15 years at the most in the wild where basically they just get pregnant a couple of times.

Or like a lot of times during their lifetime and just reproduce and have pups and cycle just continues over and over again until they die from exhaustion.

It's pretty nuts.

No.

So usually in captivity, all the otters that you might see in aquariums are all females because a lot of these bigger aquariums, they actually use them as surrogates for wild otters that might be orphans.

So if the mom in the wild dies, there's usually this pup that's wandering alone.

And since they're threatened, at least in California, there's been a program to basically take these otters in and especially their females, they'll have the surrogates raise them until they can re-release them in the wild when they're old enough.