Giant Otters & Parrots

Peru & Bolivia Rio Health.  Like the dolphins further north in the Amazon, the otters are large fish-eating mammals with few predators themselves: save humans.  Sadly, this huge otter - similar in size to the related sea otters of the Pacific coast - has been wiped out of much of it's former range in the Amazon Basin due to hunting for its pelt.  Although this threat is much reduced, the otter now faces new threats from humans in the form of mercury contamination, commercial fishing with nets, and the sheer numbers of people moving into their habitat. 

Participants help carry out research on otters living in the pristine Rio Heath which forms the border of Peru and Bolivia as well as on lakes on the Madre de Dios where there is extensive ecotourism, gold mining, and fishing.  The goals are to use photo-identification of individual otters to better understand their population dynamics and dispersal, to sample otters (shed hair) and their food supply for documenting the level of heavy metal contamination in their habitat, and finally to sample fish populations in the oxbow lakes they inhabit to better understand their role in structuring fish communities.