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.”

Splash came to him at 4 months old, donated in August 2024 by Wildlife World Zoo in Phoenix. At home, Splash lives less like a lab subject than like an eccentric, overconfident relative. He has free run of the house. He adores the working canines Hadsell already had. “He very much wants to be around them,” Hadsell says. Even Hadsell’s wife, who he says wasn’t much of an animal person, has been won over. Her position, should anything ever happen to her husband, is blunt: The dogs might have to go, but “I’m keeping the otter.”

Like many gifted co-workers, Splash comes with quirks. He knows how to work doorknobs and cupboards and can unscrew a bottle cap. He hoards a favorite marble in the backyard. If left home while the dogs go out on a mission, he throws what Hadsell calls “a little hissy fit,” knocking things over on the lanai. When it’s his turn to go, though, he heads for the van with professional enthusiasm, piling in with the dogs.

The work itself is still evolving. Hadsell says Splash has done about 30 missions so far and that 2026 is his “proofing year,” the year to refine techniques and figure out what works best. He says agencies have responded eagerly when he’s offered to bring the otter to cold cases at no charge, in part because old investigations often run into budget limits.

Some of the most fascinating parts of Splash’s story are also the most unusual. Hadsell says Splash works in zero-visibility water, locates a target and returns to tell Hadsell by tugging at his scuba mask. Otters don’t simply “smell odor underwater” in the plainest sense, he says. Instead, he says, otters find fish through vibrations in their whiskers and then use what he calls a “bubble technique.” Once Splash is close to a target, he blows bubbles onto whatever he’s after, sucks some of them back in and “tastes them,” using taste as “odor confirmation.”

Even that, Hadsell says, doesn’t fully explain Splash’s work in zero-visibility water. His own theory is that Splash is also using some combination of whiskers, electromagnetism and magnetic-field sensing. He says Splash can locate a target in water so murky Hadsell “can’t see his hands in front of his face.” He trains him with two types of material: legally obtained human material and an odorless, pseudo-sample made by Scent Logic that matches the resonance frequency of human remains. He says that the second method is what helps Splash locate remains in low-visibility water.

What is clearer is that the system is practical, not magical: Splash finds something, Hadsell marks the area, then divers move in with a grid and tools to search the bottom.

It’s also not without risk. Hadsell says Splash once became hung up on an underwater tree and nearly drowned while attached to a line. Now Splash deploys without being tethered. “We were worried he would run off, but he always comes back,” Hadsell says. The trainer has also developed underwater communication cues, including line pulls and a small horn, to recall him. “We’re learning as we go,” he says.

There’s something tender about it all: the forensic otter, the K9 trainer, the scuba diver in his 60s, the nonprofit, the custom harnesses, the otter sitters, the little marble stash and a kiddie pool Splash plays in until it’s dry. And yet beneath the novelty is a serious purpose. Hadsell says there are “hundreds of cases out there” in which remains in water were never recovered because the trail stopped at the shoreline.

That may be the most moving thing about Splash. He is adorable. He is also, in Hadsell’s telling, a working animal who fills a gap in the system and, in places where visibility is gone and time has done its damage, provides one more chance to find what was lost and bring somebody home.