The Otters of Singapore — and Other Unexpected Wildlife Thriving in Cities | Philip Johns | TED

When I first moved to Singapore, I thought it was magical.

Here's this clean, bright, pretty, well-run city

with twisted, tall skyscrapers made of steel and glass

that's rising out of what's left of a tropical rainforest.

And it wasn't just tropical rainforests, it was animals.

Walk around and you see sunbirds flitting amongst the flowers.

You see hornbills hopping from branch to branch on campus.

You see colugos

and Sumatran flying dragons

and paradise tree snakes gliding from tree to tree.

All of this was just so amazing to me.

The first week I came to Singapore

there was a fight during the day, out in the open

between a king cobra and a reticulated python

on the campus of NTU.

(Laughter)

That same first week there was video of --

and I'm trying to think which way I'm looking.

There was video of a pangolin walking down the stairway

between Yale-NUS and RC4.

I started to look for a place to live.

And I went to a flat that I wanted to rent.

And I walked out on the balcony and a parakeet flew,

a wild parakeet flew and landed on my shoulder.

And the property manager asked me, "Are you going to take the flat?"

And I said, "Of course I am.

A little bird told me to."

(Laughter)

This was just amazing to me.

Everything about Singapore was just incredible to me.

When I first moved here, I kept wondering to myself, you know,

what is this place with these tall, twisted skyscrapers?

And at the same time, we have brightly-colored birds flying,

hornbills that are eyeing people on campus,

gliding lizards and colugos and snakes.

It was just amazing to me.

To me, it was utterly fantastical.

And everything, everywhere, was otters.

So the otters started to blow up on social media

just before I came to Singapore in 2015,

and one family in particular started to get a lot of attention,

the Bishan family,

because it lived downtown near all the famous landmarks of Singapore.

And so they were getting a lot of attention,

and this was really exciting to me.

And this is a video from 2016.

These are phone videos for the most part,

but this is the Bishan mom,

and these are her second brood of pups.

Now we never get this close to otters anymore,

so I deserve some scolding.

Those are some Yale-NUS students and an otter watcher.

And if you look upstream, you'll see the Bishan dad with a fish.

And those whining noises.

Those are begging calls from the pups.

That is a little bit of something that's not actually in my script.

You can see the otters are sprainting, they have a communal latrine site.

And I didn't know this because I just started.

And so I was actually sitting in their latrine.

These otters that are swimming upriver here,

these are the prior year's brood.

So these are three-yearling otters, they're are sexually mature otters

and they stay with the family.

All of this was just incredible to me.

And part of the reason it was incredible to everybody

is that the otters were returning after a long absence.

So we know that there were otters in Singapore

sometime before the mid-20th century.

And we know partly because of individual accounts,

but partly because of things like this.

This is Haw Par Villa

and these are statues of otters in Haw Par Villa.

But this installation was moved in 1937.

So before 1937, we know that otters weren't just present in Singapore,

but they were prominent in Singapore.

And prominent enough that their statues were put with Chinese legends.

But then Singapore started to change.

It modernized, it started to industrialize,

and all of a sudden the waterways got filthy.

And what happened was they started to fill with sludge,

industrial pollution and dead animals to the point where they stank.

And otters live in water, they eat fish in water,

and they couldn't eat and live in waterways that were that dirty.

So they left.

But things changed again.

Singapore enacted policies to clean up their waterways,

and they were really, really successful.

So all of a sudden,

instead of having waterways that were filled with filth,

we had waterways that were filled with fish.

And from the otters' point of view, they were feeding troughs,

so they came back.

And now we have lots of otters all over Singapore.

We have about 12 families.

These are smooth-coated otters.

They're a pretty large otter.

The adults get up to about 10 kilograms,

which is larger than the European common otter.

They're a little bit unusual as mammals go,

because the adult offspring stay with the family as helpers.

So a family group might have two dominant breeding individuals

and one or two sets of adult offspring that are staying as helpers,

and then a brood of pups, which is pretty typical.

The family sizes are quite large in Singapore,

we have families that are over 20 individuals,

and we have more than a dozen families in Singapore.

And those families are watched by otter watchers,

some of whom go out and watch the otters every day.

My students worked closely with some of the otter watchers,

and we got to find out all sorts of interesting things.

So these are otters playing.

Otters have a really tough life.

They wake up in the morning,

they fish, they roll around in the grass,

they play, they go to sleep.

And then a few hours later, they do it again.

So my students wanted to know

whether adults and pups played differently.

And what they did to look at this

is [they] found literally dozens of interactions like this

and looked at the frequencies of role switching

among the individuals who are playing.

So the pups here, if you watch them long enough,

they do something where one pup will chase the other,

and then it'll switch roles

so the second pup chases the first.

It's very much like "Tag, you're it."

It turns out that pups do this a lot,

and adults don't do this much at all.

If an adult is in a dominant position, it stays in a dominant position.

But this tells us something.

It tells us something about how play has different functions

for pups versus adults.

For pups, play is a way that they're figuring things out

and they're learning.

But for adults, they're jockeying for a position in the social group.

And that's why they don't give up their position of dominance.

I don't know if you noticed this,

it was early in the video, but there's a monitor lizard

that's watching the otters play.

And it turns out this is pretty common.

Monitor lizards and otters live in the same environments.

They both eat fish, and they bump into each other all the time.

And otters sometimes attack the monitor lizards,

and sometimes they kill the monitor lizards,

but not all the time.

So my students wanted to know when do otters attack?

What conditions lead to the otters attacking sometimes

but not other times.

This is a pair of otters that are approaching a monitor lizard,

and if you notice, the monitor lizard's frill is open,

its throat frill is open.

It's in an aggressive posture right here.

And in fact, just seconds after this picture was taken,

the monitor lizard whipped its tail at the otters.

So monitor lizards can also be aggressive.

But most of the time, including here,

they're reacting to the otters.

What my students found after looking at dozens of these kinds of interactions,

was that otters were more likely to be aggressive

if there were pups around,

and they were most likely to be aggressive

if there were more pups in a group than there were adults.

So the otters are only aggressive to defend the pups.

The otters are big and they're fast and smart,

and they don't really have to worry about the monitor lizards very much.

But the pups do because they're small and they're kind of dumb.

It turns out that pups drive a lot of the things that otters do.

So watch what's going on here.

Do you see how they're swimming in a line?

By the way, we never get this close to otters anymore.

I scold my students if I see this, and I get scolded if I’m this close.

We try and give otters a pretty wide berth.

What they're doing here is catching fish.

But what's interesting is they're catching really small fish.

This is called herding or corralling,

depending on the medium in which they're doing it.

And it turns out that otters do this only when they have pups.

And when they do it, they typically catch very small fish.

So this isn't a way for them to catch more fish,

and it isn't a way for them to catch larger fish.

What it is, is a way for them to teach their pups how to hunt.

And it's not just that the pups are learning how to hunt

by being with the adults.

It's that the adults are actively changing their behavior

so that they can teach the pups what to do.

So all of these discoveries,

and there are a few more of them,

we couldn't have done without the otter watchers.

And the otter watchers are incredibly dedicated to watching otters.

We really owe them a lot,

and I really want to kind of voice that gratitude towards them.

And a lot of things motivate otter watchers.

So otter watchers might be curious about the otters,

they might like the otters.

But a lot of the otter watchers are photographers,

and that's their primary hobby.

And for them, this is a chance to get really excellent photographs.

The same thing in Singapore is true with birders.

If you've ever gone birding in Singapore,

it's a little bit surreal

because rather than go out and look for people with big binoculars,

you look for people with big cameras.

But otter watching and bird watching are gateways.

They're gateways for people to interact with nature.

And so people who might start otter watching

because they want to get photographs of cute pups,

might continue to do other things

because they've formed a connection with nature.

And we see this all the time:

that people care about nature when they form some connection to nature.

Whether that connection is to otters

or to a pair of hornbills on campus

or to a bird that visits them on their balcony,

we need these personal connections, and we see them all over the place.

So that's one thing to emphasize.

But I'm not the only one who's thinking about this.

Singapore has enacted a lot of policies

that make these kinds of connections a lot easier.

So we talked about Singapore cleaning up its waterways

in the '70s and '80s.

They've done a lot of other things, too,

including plant over a million trees.

There are over 300 parks and nature reserves.

Singapore has a plan that no one should be more than 10 minutes away

from some kind of park.

There are a lot of reasons to do this,

and some of these are public health reasons.

But one of the effects of this

is that people will have more chances to interact with nature,

and they'll have more chances to care.

So I'm really excited about these possibilities,

especially in Singapore,

especially because Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries

in the world.

Recently, NParks changed its motto.

NParks had the motto that Singapore is a city in a garden,

and they changed it to Singapore is the city in nature.

And I think this is a real effort on Singapore's part

to shift how they view their relationship to nature.

I think we're trying to get away from something

where nature is over there on the other side of a fence

or a wall or something like that.

Nature is something that's around us

and above us and beside us,

and Singapore is acknowledging that.

And that's true in lots of places, including in cities.

So I think this also raises other questions,

such as: Can cities be wildlife refuges?

Is the biodiversity we see in Singapore,

is this the last hot ember of the biodiversity that was here before?

Or is this something that we can protect and maybe foster and grow?

Lots of cities have wildlife, it's not just Singapore.

Most North American cities have wildlife like raccoons and coyotes,

and some have bears and bobcats.

But sometimes there are even more impressive things.

For example, Los Angeles has mountain lions,

and Mumbai has leopards.

And there's still one jaguar kicking around Tucson.

So there's still these big cats, not just, you know, predators,

but big cats that are in other cities.

And Singapore, unlike some of those cities,

is just incredibly, incredibly dense in terms of human population.

And yet we're ripe with wildlife.

So I think it's a real question.

Can we make cities that are wildlife refuges?

Can we make cities that foster some kind of productive relationship

between wildlife and humans?

Can we make cities where we exist in close proximity,

side by side?

I think we can.

The founder of Singapore, famously, or at least as legend has it,

saw a large creature moving along and he thought it was a lion,

and so he named Singapore after it.

Singa Pura, Lion City.

And much later, Singapore adopted its mascot of a merlion,

which is supposed to celebrate Singapore's history as a sea city

and this legacy of it being a Lion City.

Obviously, there are no lions in Singapore outside of the zoo,

and there never were.

But we do have a ferocious mammalian predator

that hunts in groups,

that fights giant lizards.

(Laughter)

That protects and teaches its offspring.

And that’s frequent in the waterways around Singapore.

Isn't that predator sort of half fish and half lion?

Singapore is magic.

(Applause)