Sea Otter Awareness Week

September 21 – 27, 2025

Annually, throughout the last full week of September, we celebrate sea otters during Sea Otter Awareness Week. We encourage zoological and educational institutions, governmental agencies and communities to plan and undertake events that highlight sea otters. These activities include sharing stories, disseminating science and generating media that inspire a deeper awareness of these unique marine mammals, their ecological importance and the many challenges they face.

Sea Otter Awareness Week is organized and sponsored by Defenders of Wildlife, Sea Otter Savvy, California Department of Parks and Recreation, the Elakha Alliance, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

2025 Theme: Anchored in Hope

Close your eyes and visualize a sea otter. In all likelihood, you will conjure an image of a fuzzy brown creature moored in surface kelp, taking a break from its role as a coastal influencer. This vision can help us feel peaceful and calm, even hopeful.

Our 2025 theme, “Anchored in Hope,” provides a metaphor for optimism, stability, and security in a challenging world.

As a keystone predator, sea otters regulate the biodiversity and resilience of kelp forests by controlling populations of kelp-eating animals. They symbolize the interconnections that sustain life in nearshore habitats. However, we must ensure the future of sea otters so that they can continue to paddle the nearshore waters and fulfill their foundational role in coastal habitats.

Mismanagement of coastal resources and human-caused climate change have caused a dramatic loss of kelp canopy along the Northern California and Oregon coasts, creating systemic imbalances and reducing biodiversity and biomass. The prospect of reintroducing sea otters to these damaged areas—restoring this top predator to places where it has remained absent for as long as two centuries—could offer an unparalleled strategy for helping restore and renew coastal ecosystems. Sea otters remind us that we need an interspecies etiquette that compels us to coexist with the natural world.

Hope exists! We can moor ourselves to it the same way that holdfasts anchor kelp stalks to the seafloor or sea otters enfold themselves in kelp fronds to rest. Then, just like the sea otter in our 2025 logo, we might find ourselves anchored, connected, and secured rather than lost at sea. Hope serves as our active response for combating despair over climate change, environmental degradation, and the alarming state of the world. Defenders and our Sea Otter Awareness Week partners invite everyone to emulate the sea otters by anchoring themselves in hope.