For sea otters, rocks are an important part of daily life — used as tools to crack open hard-shelled snacks and as playthings to juggle. In fact, otters will often have a “favorite rock,” they seem to hold especially dear.
But one sea otter in California evidently stumbled upon yet another use for hers.
Winning over new friends.
A video has been making the rounds on TikTok in recent days, posted by @user8736150399263, showing a fascinating interaction between a sea otter and a fisherman.
In it, the fisherman is walking along a dock when he stops to observe an otter swimming nearby. The otter, not surprisingly, is carrying what may be her favorite rock — but then she does the unexpected.
She deposits it where the fisherman could reach:
@user8736150399263 #fyp #seaotter #seaottersoftiktok #californiawildlife #commercialfishing #friends
Turns out, the otter didn’t plan to give the rock away forever. After a moment, she collects it again.
But the fisherman was smitten regardless.
Margherita Bandini, an ethologist and deputy chair of the IUCN SSC Otter Specialist Group, has published research on otters’ use of rocks. She suspects that the otter in the video may have been planning to hop aboard the dock, and had set the rock down beforehand to not drop it. Then she changed her mind entirely.
But even an otter’s favorite rock can sometimes fall out of favor.
“The rocks are important, but not all rocks are the most important, so that could have been a ‘less important’ rock. [They] definitely use rocks for extended periods of time,” Bandini told The Dodo. “The best rocks are the ones that help open prey more efficiently. They can be used until a better one is found.”