In the backyard of his home in Englewood, Mike Hadsell has filled several kiddie pools with water.
Floating in one of them is Splash, a 2-year-old Asian small-clawed otter.
This puppy-sized otter has been taught to find the bodies of missing people underwater. It's a skill learned by getting a tasty seafood snack.
As part of Splash's training, Hadsell tosses a canister into the pool, which contains the odor of human remains.
"Watch him hunt it,” said Hadsell. “It's amazing how they find stuff in there. I could throw that anywhere in there, and he will just absolutely have no problem finding it.”
Bubbles filled with scent molecules emerge from the canister. Splash then sucks them up, effectively "tasting" them to identify the remains.
It's a handy skill for searching in low-visibility conditions in Florida’s rivers and swamps.
"90% of the water that I work in when I do forensic recovery is black water,” said Hadsell. “I can't see my hand in front of my face half the time."
Hadsell is the president of Peace River K9 Search and Rescue.
He says search dogs have very sensitive noses and can be trained to find people in lots of different situations.
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But underwater isn't one of them.
"When a person decomposes underwater, they generate an odor pool and that gets down into the muck," Hadsell said. “It also rises to the surface. The dogs will alert to the odor pool that's at the top. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the remains are directly below it."
Hadsell is a veteran of search and recovery dive work.
He says he first learned how intelligent otters are in Thailand, where fishermen use the animals to herd fish into nets.
As it turns out, the Asian small-clawed otter is also uniquely qualified for underwater recovery work. Unlike other otters, this species has paws that function like human hands. And they can seal off their ears and nostrils to stay underwater for up to eight minutes.
When they're out working on a case, Hadsell puts on his diving gear and jumps into the water with Splash.
"He leaves me, all I see is his butt going as he's heading out, and then he comes back and he grabs my mask to let me know that he's found something,” Hadsell said. “I attach a line to him, and then I just follow the line."
If Splash has tasted an odor, he swims down to the spot where it came from.
To date, Hadsell says Splash has been on more than 30 missions. Most recently to a retaining pond in Polk County, where Sheriff Grady Judd weighed in on a Facebook Live event.
"We're searching for a missing person,” Judd said to his online audience. “Sadly, we fear she may be in the water that we're about to search. This is the first time in 53 years of law enforcement we've ever used a cadaver otter. So, we're pretty excited."
Ultimately, Splash did not detect any evidence of remains in Polk County, but Hadsell says the otter has had nine success stories.
Most of the cases have not made it to trial yet, but in a private case, Splash found several bones from a missing woman in a canal in Marion County.
The family requested Splash's help because they wanted to recover all of her remains.
"Splash came in, marked several areas, so they went back with a dredger,” Hadsell said. “And they started sucking it all out, and every place that Splash was interested in, they were pulling bones out."
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Hadsell's group works with forensic specialists and law enforcement across the country. But they don't charge for the service. As a volunteer nonprofit group, he says they rely on donations because otters are not cheap.
"It takes me a year to train them up,” he said. “I'd have to charge, you know, $30,000, $40,000 because I had to put so much time into it. And they're expensive to maintain. They eat raw fish, you know, $17 a pound is about $150 bucks a week."
When he is not in the water, Splash is often cuddling with Hadsell's search dogs.
"If I get my dive gear out, the dogs are always by the back door ready to go because they know that means we're traveling, we're gonna go do something,” said Hadsell. “He's just like them now. He's squeaking and squawking and throwing a fit. He's just part of the team now."
And at the end of the day, Splash sleeps in the family bed, perhaps dreaming of his next mission.
The dedicated emergency worker is booked out through October and partial to being paid in raw salmon.
