Meet Splash: The World’s First Search-And-Rescue Otter Hunting For Missing People In Florida

The intrepid mustelid is the latest addition to the team at Peace River K9 Search and Rescue. They’ve traditionally used dogs to track the scent of missing people, but when investigations spill underwater, a canine’s capabilities are limited. 

“The saying was that the investigation ends at the water’s edge,” Mike Hadsell at Peace River K9 Search and Rescue told Tampa’s local news outlet WTSP. “I thought, why can’t we train an otter to do this kind of work?”

Having posted online about his out-there approach to underwater search-and-rescue, Hadsell was contacted by an Arizona zoo with an ideal candidate: an Asian small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus) called Splash.

For a little over a year, Hadsell has been training Splash in his backyard, filling three kiddie pools with water as well as, ominously, the scent of human remains.

“Splash is trained to locate and identify the odor of human remains. So, his job is to find the human victim underwater in the low visibility conditions that we can’t see them,” Hadsell told WTSP, explaining that humans emit over 500 volatile organic compounds unique to our species that can be used to locate us.

“You’ll see all these bubbles coming out, and he’s sucking some of those bubbles back in and he’s tasting them. The odor attaches itself to the bubble, and then he tastes it when it comes into his mouth. And so that’s how he does it. When he finds something, he comes back and he grabs my mask,” Hadsell added. His good work is then rewarded with a treat of salmon.

Splash and the rest of the rescue team have also branched out from backyard pools to Florida’s waterways. The curious carnivore is tethered to a line to keep him safe and make sure he doesn’t swim off, and he’s tracked by his teammates and sonar. The biggest threat both he and his human counterparts face is from alligators, Hadsell says. 

So far in his short career, Splash has three successful finds, according to Popular Science, garnering interest from all over the country, including from the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “He’s working his way up the food chain,” Hadsell laughed.

In his downtime, Splash likes to wrestle, pestering the cats and dogs of Peace River K9 Search and Rescue. At the end of a long, hard day, the otter puts his paws up and has a well-deserved rest, in bed with Hadsell.

Splash is the world’s first search-and-rescue otter – but he may not be the last. “I think they’ll be standard issue probably in 10 years from now,” Hadsell said. He hopes that Splash, and others like him, will help make a dent in the thousands of open missing people cases currently in the Sunshine State.