River otters are so cute that it’s easy to overlook their bad behavior.
But two attacks — rare and separate incidents — have injured women who were out enjoying a swim, turning a summer idyll into a panicked rush to Tahoe Forest Hospital’s emergency room.
River otters are distant cousins to sea otters such as Otter 841, a 5-year-old female who this summer gained international notoriety for accosting surfers and kayakers in Santa Cruz and continues to evade capture. Their population once plummeted due to fur-hunting. Now they are protected and their numbers are rebounding.
While different in many ways, the two species share a mean streak, especially if protecting young.
“I felt something really sharp on my butt, and started screaming,” said Crystal Finn, 41, who on the balmy afternoon of July 11 joined cousins for a swim in the Middle Fork of the Feather River near the family’s property on the edge of Plumas National Forest. “Then I felt a bite on my leg.”
“Then I saw these three little heads pop up, right in front of me,” said Finn, a New York City actor who performed alongside Debra Messing in the Broadway play “Birthday Candles” last year and appeared as Lauren Pawson this year on the hit TV series “Succession.” “But I was so disoriented. Seeing otters — initially, it just didn’t add up.”
A strong swimmer, she raced to the river bank for safety, kicking furiously and keeping her face above water in a backstroke. Twice more, they attacked, biting her shin and the back of her knee.
“They were all coming for me,” she said. “It seemed rather orchestrated. And as soon as I was out of there, they seemed happy to bob along, go on their way.”
Two days earlier, another swimmer sustained more serious injuries. The incident — 10 to 15 bites, some requiring sutures — took place at Serene Lakes, near Soda Springs.
The swimmer first noticed something brushing up against her, according to physician Dr. Martin Rosengreen, an emergency room doctor at Tahoe Forest Hospital in Truckee.
“All of a sudden, two otters were attacking,” said Rosengreen, who did not disclose the patient’s name to protect confidentiality. “She was trying to fend them off and just trying to protect her face.”
Bleeding and panicked, she sought safety by swimming to a nearby paddleboarder. “I’m sorry,” she told the man, “but I’m coming up.”
At the hospital, both women received precautionary rabies treatments, a complicated regimen requiring an immunoglobulin and an initial dose of the rabies vaccine, then return visits for follow-up shots on the third, seventh and fourteenth days. Both women also received antibiotics.
Otter injuries are typically puncture wounds, like a dog bite, said Rosengreen. If sutures are needed, they’re stitched loosely, to reduce the risk of infection.
Those two incidents were the first otter bites to be treated at Tahoe Forest Hospital in recent years, said Rosengreen. Most animal attacks involve dogs. Bears are responsible for about one case a year. Once, the hospital treated a bicyclist who was bitten by a coyote.
A more vicious otter attack made national headlines earlier this week when three women were bitten while inner tubing on Montana’s Jefferson River. Submerged in water after their inner tube burst, one woman suffered multiple lacerations on her hands, arms, legs, and backside and needed emergency helicopter evacuation. Another woman received injuries to her face, ears, arms, hands, legs, thighs and ankle.
While they share a name, river otters and sea otters are quite different in many ways, according to a 2016 study of skulls and bite mechanics by Texas A&M zoologists.
River otters have 36 teeth and long, narrow skulls capable of fast bites to snap at their usual prey: slippery fish.
Sea otters like Santa Cruz’s 841, in contrast, have shorter jaws and a crushing bite that is perfect for pulverizing sea urchins, crabs, clams and other marine invertebrates. Menacing Otter 841 has yet to bite a human, just getting their surfboards.
They’re generally harmless, said Megan Isadore, executive director of the River Otter Ecology Project, a Forest Knolls-based group of volunteers who support watershed conservation.
“Otters are not prone to attacking people,” she said. “It’s very seldom, especially considering how many people are in the water, all over the country.”
While not familiar with the details of the two California incidents, Isadore said that “when otters attack, it’s most often because they have young nearby and feel threatened.”
Isadore said otters take a long time to grow up and strike out on their own. Youngsters are born in the spring and start learning to hunt in the summer. They may stay with their mothers until early fall. That’s why their mothers are so protective, she said.
“River otters are adorable. Beautiful, they’re fun, they’re playful,” said Isadore.
“However, they’re also fierce predators. They have big teeth, they have big claws, and they have no fear of almost anything,” she said. “They’re wild animals, and it’s always best to treat all wildlife with caution.”
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