Meet Splash, America's Only Underwater Recovery Otter

https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/news-and-profiles/2026/06/splash-underwater-recovery-otter

Meet Splash, America’s Only Underwater Recovery Otter

By Kim Doleatto June 1, 2026 Published in the June 2026 issue of Sarasota Magazine

Splash is the sort of creature perhaps better suited to children’s books than forensic work. He’s 2 years old, weighs 12 pounds and, according to his trainer Michael Hadsell, sleeps on the couch, likes belly rubs, destroys remote controls and gives what Hadsell calls “head hugs” in the morning by wrapping his paws around the trainer’s head. He also uses the toilet.

But Splash isn’t merely a household oddity. Hadsell, who founded Peace River Search and Rescue—a Florida nonprofit that provides dogs, drones, a dive team and even scent-trained horses—has been training animals since 1980. He says the Asian small-clawed otter is part of an unusual effort to help recover human remains in water, especially in old cases where cadaver dogs can’t locate what has sunk into mud below. “The dogs can only get you so far,” Hadsell says. “[They’ve been] the last link in the chain.” Splash, he says, can go the rest of the way.

In a typical water-recovery case, he says, detectives bring in cadaver dogs to work from a boat. If there are human remains, the scent can rise to the surface, where a dog can detect it. But an alert on the surface doesn’t always translate to a recovery below. Currents shift. Sediment builds. Time passes. What was once a body can become scattered remains buried in mud beneath dark water. “The dog will alert from the boat, even after five years,” Hadsell says. “But the diver goes down and finds nothing, because it’s all in the muck.” Too often, he says, “the investigation ends at the water’s edge.” That frustration is what led him to an otter.

Hadsell says he had the idea for years. He lived in Thailand, where he saw otters being used for location tasks, including fishing and pearl-diving work. Later, at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota with his grandkids, he watched otters responding to cues from a handler and thought that after his decades of training, “I should be able to figure out how to train an otter.”

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Meet Splash, the nation’s first search and recovery otter | NBC 7 San Diego

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