They were circling around one individual
all going for this one otter.
The single most brutal,
most interesting
and the hardest thing to watch that I’ve ever witnessed in nature.
I’m Dan O’Neill,
I’m a documentary filmmaker and biologist.
The first expedition I ever went on was nearly ten years ago,
to Guyana.
It’s a small country in the north of South America, and it’s incredibly special to me.
It’s 85% pristine tropical rainforest, right on the equator.
And it is known not just as the land of giants,
but also the land of many waters.
It was an ambitious expedition, a very small team of us,
and we were going 300 miles into the interior of the Amazon,
up this river system that basically nobody goes to.
I kind of had this hit list of creatures I wanted to see.
Iconic Amazonian wildlife,
like Howler monkeys, Harpy eagles, Tapirs,
and even the fabled Jaguar.
But in the land of many waters in Guyana,
the king of those waters is really the giant river otters.
100 years ago, they were pretty much found across all of South America, all of the river systems.
But in 1993, their status was changed to endangered, because over that period of time,
they had massive pressures from hunting, mining, logging, habitat loss.
So I was hopeful, but I never thought
that really I was going to have that kind of iconic otter encounter
that I dreamed of having,
until I went up to these remote regions of Guyana.
The only way
to get to the kind of areas of the Amazon that humans don’t bother to go,
is to go along the rivers and go up waterfalls.
You have to portage.
You get out of your boats.
You cut a transect through the jungle right to the top where it comes out,
and then you drag your boats all the way up and all of your gear up.
This is the bamboo line.
and then you get back in your boat and you push on, and you push on,
and you find another waterfall, do exactly the same thing.
And some rivers have several,
sometimes tens of waterfalls that go far up into their most remote regions.
And every kind of waterfall stairwell you go up, you reach a new land
a new citadel of the wildlife where they’re slightly less afraid of people.
And eventually, when you go four, five, six waterfalls up.
Those animals have never seen a person before.
They don’t know to be afraid of you and you can get unbelievably close.
It’s a wild tapir
about five feet from us. and we’d set our camps along the river’s edge.
We would drift down the river,
We’d do that before nightfall,
and we woke up early, and then we broke down our camp and we carried on.
But one morning, I woke up really, really early about 5:00,
and you could hear the dawn chorus and everything is extremely loud.
The rainforest is waking up.
I got into the canoe,
and I just drifted down the river,
and I remember hearing this unmistakable sound
*imitates otters chirping*
which is the sound of giant river otters, a troop of them.
As I got closer and closer, they started to make another unmistakable otter sound,
I kind of wah wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
You often hear them one sound and they’re gone.
But this was really powerful, much more guttural
than any of the other sounds we’d heard along our way.
And I came around the bend, and there were all of these spyhopping otters
loads and loads of them coming up and looking at something.
At first I thought that it was a battle
of two troops of otters, and I was going to be able to get in close
I realized that they weren’t really all at each other,
but they were circling around one individual.
They were mercilessly just going for this guy, at him, and at him, and at him.
And they were all on the tops of the water,
usually when when they come up, they go down and they disappear and they come up somewhere else.
But these were all up, their heads were all out of the water.
They were working in such a way,
they were using their hunting teamwork against this individual.
They would spy-hop up when he was up and they’d go down when he was down,
and they would corner him, and they’d attack, and attack, and attack.
And obviously I couldn’t see underwater, but I know how brutal they can be.
They could have easily been giving him really bad injuries
that could end up in death.
It’s really incredible to watch I’ve never been so close
to such a visceral wildlife encounter.
They are predators.
They’re big apex, Amazonian predators
with very sharp, very large teeth, very sharp claws,
and they’re intelligent hunters.
They were using all of those skills on this one otter.
Smart animals know that fighting is costly.
It’s a really costly thing to do.
So there are very few confirmed cases of otter fights.
You know, that’s one thing being excited about seeing something that’s,
you know, often never captured,
and another thing to actually witness just how brutal
those rare situations can be.
Otters live in primarily extended family groups, but they will
occasionally accept new individuals, and they will drive out individuals, mostly males.
They have their sections of river.
They respect other groups and they know their lines and they’ll avoid each other.
I think what might have happened in this situation, this case was a male was either
in the process of being kicked out of a group, or it was one that was on its own,
and it thought, this is my chance to join a group ,
and they weren’t having any of it.
But it’s understandable if one’s on its own.
All of those skills, all of that evolutionary history, it’s not made for that.
They’re incredibly territorial animals
and that is the choice that they make.
They have to show their strength and they have to rule that section of river.
And if that means killing other otters, that’s exactly what they’ll do.
And it’s not what you expect to see.
You can imagine fights between different species, but there’s something
particularly horrible about watching one species attack its own kind,
and how much more
scary that would have been for an otter,
to watch animals who look like you trying to kill you.
It’s such a powerful image
of the realities of the competition of the Amazon.
This expedition was ten years ago
and I’ve been going to Guyana almost every year since.
I’ve even done that expedition more than once
and in all the times I’ve been out there
and all the trips I’ve been on
I’ve never had an encounter like that since.
It is the single most brutal, most interesting,
and the hardest thing to watch that I’ve ever witnessed in nature.
