A tale of two otters: settling in Singapore, suffering in China

Few urbanites have seen an otter. Fewer still have seen a “romp” of them. Yet in Singapore, the most urbanized country in the world, commuters can watch whole families breakfast on fish just a few minutes from the city center. After gaining independence in 1965, Singapore almost immediately began cleaning up its rivers, according to N. Sivasothi, a senior lecturer of biology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). At this point, otters had become extinct on the island. “The results were [that] the transformation of anoxic black rivers improved to the point [that] fish are well stocked and feeding the smooth-coated otters well,” he said. It began in 1998, when a pair of smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata) sneaked into the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve on the north coast from mainland Malaysia. The mangrove-forested reserve sits just across the Johor Strait from Malaysia, and the otters most likely sought refuge there from development projects on the peninsula. By 2014, Sivasothi had recorded the otter’s expansion across the western and southern coasts of the island. By 2015, a family was dropping pups right in the heart of the city. A smooth-coated otter dines on raw fish in Marina Bay, located in the city centre. Photograph credit: Jeffrey Teo. Suffering in China The Singapore story is a sanctuary of hope in a region otherwise largely hostile to aquatic weasels. A paper published in Oryx in 2017 found a devastating drop in otter populations in another part of Asia: China. China is historically…

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