It was a foggy October afternoon on the central California coast when the Marine Mammal Center got a call on their public hotline: there were distressed cries coming from the frigid waters in Morro Bay.

The center’s experts were able to determine that the calls — which sounded almost like a human baby screeching — were coming from a roughly 2-week-old sea otter pup that had been separated from its mother.

That could be deadly for young sea otters, according to Shayla Zink, who works at the center in Morro Bay.

“That pup is really relying on everything it learns from the mother to be able to survive in the ocean,” Zink said, adding that a mother sea otter cares for her pup for up to nine months, often carrying her small baby on her chest.

The employees at the center, with the help of th

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