{"id":119572,"date":"2020-11-25T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2020-11-24T22:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-this-baby-otter-is-helping-keep-vancouver-aquarium-afloat\/"},"modified":"2020-11-25T01:00:54","modified_gmt":"2020-11-24T22:00:54","slug":"how-this-baby-otter-is-helping-keep-vancouver-aquarium-afloat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-this-baby-otter-is-helping-keep-vancouver-aquarium-afloat\/","title":{"rendered":"#How this baby otter is helping keep Vancouver Aquarium afloat"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How this baby otter is helping keep Vancouver Aquarium afloat<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Other otters have won hearts and donations for the aquarium, but this is no ordinary Joey. The pup’s 24\/7 livestream made him a social media<\/a> sensation during the pandemic.\n <\/div>\n
\n One night in early July, a woman in the Vancouver Island village of Kyuquot heard the cries of an animal in distress through the darkness from the nearby seashore. The next day, she returned to the area to find a tiny otter pup\u20143.8 lb. and no more than two weeks old\u2014squealing beside a dead adult otter presumed to be his mother. Hypothermic and hungry, the pup was flown 300 km to Vancouver\u2019s Marine Mammal Rescue Centre (MMRC), operated by non-profit conservation organization Ocean Wise.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, as the otter recovered, the centre tried something it had never done\u2014a YouTube livestream dedicated solely to the wriggly pup now known as Joey (so named after a donor to the rescue centre). With that, a pandemic social media star was born: on a 24-7 feed, viewers were able to watch Joey eat, sleep, play and be groomed by his caretakers. The stream, which gave way in October to a new, higher-resolution one<\/a>, garnered nearly six million views in its first three months, while highlight clips<\/a> uploaded to the centre\u2019s YouTube channel each received hundreds of thousands of views. \u201cWe\u2019ve had other otter pups in the past that have captured people\u2019s hearts\u2014locally, anyways,\u201d says Mackenzie Neale, director of animal care at the Vancouver Aquarium, which is also run by Ocean Wise. But Joey\u2019s global fame, Neale says, is on another level.<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Sea otters are back with a worrying vengeance in B.C.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The otter pup\u2019s tiny front paws, downy fur, baleful squeaks and general<\/a>ly heart-bursting cuteness are attracting not only viewers, but donors as well. His fans were able to symbolically \u201cadopt\u201d him for $35, with the money going toward his care and food (otters eat 25 per cent of their body weight every day), as well as the operation of the Vancouver Aquarium, which has faced grave financial problems in the wake of pandemic shutdowns and restrictions.<\/p>\n

\"Joey<\/p>\n

Joey the otter (Photograph by Felicia Chang)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In August, after the Department of Fisheries deemed him non-releasable, Joey was permanently transferred from the rescue centre to the aquarium, where his livestream continued and his celebrity could not be more welcome. In September, the aquarium was closed for a second time during the pandemic, this time to rethink its business model amid an 80 per cent decline in ticket sales. With gate, caf\u00e9 and gift shop revenue eliminated, says Neale, Joey the otter\u2019s fundraising has become critical: \u201cIt\u2019s part of what\u2019s keeping us alive right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since his rescue, Joey has yielded more than $200,000 in donations, the most for any single animal in the aquarium. While the closure and layoff of hundreds of employees cut costs, Jeremy Douglas, Ocean Wise\u2019s executive vice-president of external relations, says most of the facility\u2019s fixed spending\u2014some $1 million a month\u2014lies in \u201ckeeping 70,000 animals healthy, alive and fed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The video feed, he notes, lays bare how much care some rescue marine animals require. When he first arrived, Joey needed constant grooming of his incredibly dense fur, feeding every two hours and even swimming lessons\u2014all things his mother would have done for him in the first six months of his life. Since then, he has moved on to solid food and is old enough to meet other otters at the aquarium. \u201cHe\u2019s really been our ambassador for the work that we do and why it\u2019s important,\u201d says Douglas. \u201cEven with the doors to the aquarium closed, we can get lots of people from around the world having an aquarium-type experience because of Joey.\u201d The hope is that Joey fans turn their interest to the threats facing his species, and that they take action in the form of a donation.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The otter\u2019s pandemic-weary fans watch as he eats, sleeps, plays and is groomed by his caretakers (Photograph by Felicia Chang)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Along with symbolic adoptions and community fundraisers, Ocean Wise has collaborated with the Vancouver Whitecaps, the Major League Soccer team, to create a popular collection of non-medical face masks. A special one featuring Joey\u2019s little snout was a hit, with 8,000 selling in two weeks.<\/p>\n

A few factors contributed to Joey\u2019s fame, but his keepers think pandemic circumstances played a big part. People stuck in their homes can check in on the otter no matter where in the world they live. They watch his growth, which seems to occur before their eyes, and talk to staff members looking after him. \u201cIt\u2019s giving people something when so much has been taken away,\u201d Neale says. It helps, she adds, that he\u2019s \u201cprobably one of the cutest things on the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

For one international Joey fan, he\u2019s more than just entertainment. \u201cHe brings a bit of light into my day,\u201d says Georgina Tsang, a 22-year-old psychology student who lives in the U.K. She found that watching the feed, which she has open in a browser tab at all times, relaxed her during stressful moments, much as a therapy animal might. Fascinated that a sea otter from another continent could have this effect, the aspiring psychologist informally surveyed nearly 500 of Joey\u2019s fans to see if they felt the same way (they did). And there\u2019s some science<\/a> to back up Joey\u2019s therapeutic benefits. A recent study by the University of Leeds found that watching images and videos of cute animals helped reduce participants\u2019 anxiety levels.<\/p>\n

As Joey grows up, he\u2019ll be integrated with the aquarium\u2019s other resident otters and his latest livestream may come to an end. \u201cWe just have to accept that reality,\u201d says Douglas, \u201cand look at other creative ways to keep all of those Joey fans engaged.\u201d The ultra-popular feed, he notes, has been an interactive backstage pass to the life of just one otter; the aquarium houses tens of thousands of animals, and perhaps turning the camera to others will yield another star. It\u2019s a strategy they\u2019re considering, knowing the pandemic will affect operations for a while to come.<\/p>\n

Meantime, fans and donors in the Joey-verse have a catalogue of the best moments from the first few months of his life to watch over and over. For Tsang, the end of the stream will bring a mixture of sadness and shared pride in his survival. \u201cIt will be quite a change when it comes to an end,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I\u2019ll hold on to the fact that he\u2019ll be loving life with the other otters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article app<\/a>ears in print in the December 2020 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cAdorable for dollars.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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“#How this baby otter is helping keep Vancouver Aquarium afloat” Other otters have won hearts and donations for the aquarium, but this is no ordinary Joey. The pup’s 24\/7 livestream made him a social media sensation during the pandemic. One night in early July, a woman in the Vancouver Island village of Kyuquot heard the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":119573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/JOEY-THE-OTTER-VANCOUVER-AQUARIUM-DHOPADE-NOV03-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[81507,67806,75946,81508],"class_list":["post-119572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-city-of-vancouver","tag-editors-picks","tag-sea-otters","tag-vancouver-aquarium"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}