Oil kills otters at Sundarbans

Two otters have been found dead in the oil-infested waters of Shela River in the Sundarbans.Forest officials recovered the bodies floating near Andharmanik, nine days after an tanker carrying furnace oil sank in the river.
The Wildlife Management and Nature Preservation Division had been working to find the extent of the damage, official Md Jahidul Kabir told bdnews24.com Sunday.
A team headed by Jahangirnagar University Zoology Professor Monirul H Khan went to the forest at Dec 18.
The dead otters, he said, were covered in furnace oil. They had died two to three days before their bodies were discovered.
The otters are mentioned as ‘near threatened’ in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list. Their populations are now limited to the Sundarbans, but they were once widely seen living in rivers of the country’s south and western regions.