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Scientists launch massive study to save sea otters
Claudia Cowan reports from Sausalito
Hollywood actress Crystal Finn, who appeared in the final season of the HBO hit series “Succession,” said she was swimming in a California river last month, when something bit her lower extremities.
“I felt something on my backside and on my leg,” Finn told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I started looking around and yelling out and (the otters) popped up right in front of me. Then they dove down and started going at me again.”
The actress, who was treated at a hospital for the bites after the incident in North California’s Feather River, is not the only one to be bitten by the marine mammals in what experts are saying is a rare uptick in attacks.
“After the first otter attack I thought, ‘Wow that was kind of special’ and then two days later there was another one,” Tahoe Forest Hospital emergency room physician Dr. Martin Rosengreen told the newspaper.
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Actress Crystal Finn was attacked by a sea otter while swimming in a Northern California river. (Getty)
He said the first victim he saw suffered severe injuries with at least 15 to 20 bites after swimming in Serene Lakes in Northern California.
“She was out swimming in the middle of a lake and noticed something brush up on her leg,” Rosengreen said. “Then, all of a sudden they started attacking, and she was trying to fend them off and swim away from them at the same time.”
Three women in Montana were also bitten by otters while inner tubing and another otter near Santa Cruz, California, known at “841,” continues to evade capture after biting and wrestling away surfboards from surfers.
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Finn, who played producer Lauren Pawson in “Succession,” said she saw three otters during her attack and assumed it was a mother protecting her pups.
“I could see the bites on my legs and knew I had been bitten on my butt — that one was the worst, but I couldn’t see it,” she said. “The bites really hurt.”
She added that she wouldn’t have thought to be careful if she had the animals before the attack.
“If I had seen them, I don’t think it would have given me pause,” she explained. “I would have thought, ‘Oh those cute river otters.’”
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But she said she now will rethink bringing her daughter to swim in the river, saying an attack on a child, “It would have been a lot worse.”