Otters in Singapore City

The whole world is becoming a giant zoo, curated by humans. Now, for instance, there are otters living in Singapore City:

Singapore’s otter families all have names. Here, the Bishan family crosses a street in the city center.

Start reading this National Geographic article, and you soon encounter a link to another NG piece about how Hundreds of wild parrots are thriving in this Brazilian city.

But back to those otters. As Singaporeans become more affluent and more inclined to welcome the otters into their midst, and less inclined to do things like kill them and eat them, instead treating them as sort of mobile urban sculptures, …:

In 2016, an otter family suddenly ran across the Singapore Marathon route, and Otter Working Group volunteers rushed to warn the runners of the otters’ presence, as well as also position themselves along the route to prevent the animals and runners from colliding.

… the otters themselves are, understandably, becoming less frightened of humans than they used to be. Evolution in action. The adventurous otter families, willing to explore human cities in search of new ecological niches, get selected for, and the more timid ones have a harder time of it.

LATER: It’s happening here also. Otters are making themselves at home in UK cities.

One thought on “Otters in Singapore City”

  1. See also the Australia White Ibis. These things were unheard of in urban areas when I was a child in the 1970s, but Australia’s east coast cities are now full of them. Nobody is quite sure why, but there are some complicated theories about a zoo population becoming used to humans and the wild population learning that humans weren’t so bad from them.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_white_ibis

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