Just see whether we have got any broken limbs
the front limbs are intact
the hind left leg is broken
when the project started really it was driven by the fact that
Otters can be useful environmental Sentinel
and because their top of the food chain and they range across
aquatic habitats
they can pick up environmental contaminants in their issues
and by analyzing those issues we can measure the concentration of things like
PCBs
pesticides, which are very harmful not only to Otters
but also to a very wide range of wildlife and also to humans
so we saw the disappearance really of Otters from
across much of England
and population survived only in the far south west and Scotland
parts of Wales and in East Anglia. At really high levels
some of these contaminants can affect things like the reproductive biology
so impacting on how many young produced
so we were using the Otters as a means if monitoring
concentrations of those contaminants
we get Otters sent to us from all over England and Wales and
helped by members of the public who report them and
then coordinated by the Environment Agency in England
natural resources Wales in Wales and
they are couried to us. We have got an Otter come in from
and
the first thing is to weigh it and
before we open up the bag. So each animal as it
comes in we tag with an individual a reference
code and so this is actually the 2000
and number 2,201. So we have had well over 2,000 Otters
over the years. So we are looking for things like
ectoparasites which very often are found around the ears
and then we checked carefully to see if there are any
fighting injuries. Otters can be quite aggressive
and when they fight they target anal genital area
yes the tooth wear indicates
you know he is not a young animal
and but actually that probably only means about 3 years old
and then we open the otter up. I'm making an incision all the way along from the throat
and right down to the testes
so we take a hughe range of tissue samples for contaminant work for example we take
liver samples
and so they are analyzed for contaminant concentrations
we examine the kidneys and we are looking at those
sectioning those to look for kidney stone, the adrenal glands we look at
and we measure the sise and we look for any abnormalities
becasue they can be an indication of physiological stress
from the work analyzing the DNA of the Otters we can see that there are
4 regional populations between which ww
do not see much genetic mixing. In terms of the significance of that
now the view for conservation really is that we should be trying not just to maintain
species but also the genetically distinct populations of those species
so it might mean arguably that we do not try and connect up those populations
and certainly it means when we rescue individuals from the wild, we
should return them to where they are
found and not put them back in another population that maybe is
genetically different
when the project started in the early 90s
there were really very few Otters and
found dead and primarily these road kill and so I think in 1992
yet maybe less than 10 Otters and now we get nearly 200 Otters
every year and so the project has ready
grown and partly that increase I think is because of greater
public awareness but in the most part it's due to the
expansion of Otter populations, they are doing really very well now
across England and Wales, so sadly that means that more of them are getting killed in
the roads