Not this otter! This one is still fine, as far as we know.
Kenai, a sea otter rescued from the Exxon Valdez spill, died this week at age 23 and a half. She came out of the Alaska sea as a tiny pup — “She literally fit in the palm of my hand,” one of her human allies told the AP — and, after her mother died, spent a long life at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. She was the second-to-last otter survivor of the Exxon Valdez spill.
Kenai lived longer than many otters and had been having a rough time in her old age; she had “suffered a stroke, underwent ovarian cyst surgery and need a root canal” on an important, food-crunching canine tooth. But we are still having a sad over this.
So we are going to cheer ourselves up by watching videos of another standard sea otter pup that Shedd helped rescue:
And imagine that Kenai is having a grand ol’ time in sea otter heaven.
