Im sorry I've destroyed 3 of these. Iwas on my Baryonyx and I went to the swamp looking for the immune cave and a bunch of paranas attacked me so I did the spin move and in the chat it said like 15 paranas died but an otter also died so after I got the artifact I went home and made a grave. This happen 3 times different swamps.

These are awesome shoulder pets, as mentioned, they keep you warm and the weight of anything in its inventory is halved but they also make great bodyguards, I put a little into weight and health the rest into melee, not only will it increase it's insulation buff but if set to attack target, will bite anything that is aggressive and gets too close, Ollie has saved my ass a few times now.

Also, to tame one I would suggest using a flying mount to pick it up and drop it in a 1x1 with a 1 door for access and bring an Ichthyornis for collecting the fish, set the ichthy to agressive and follow, stand next to the door and wait for the fish to be delivered to feed the otter.

If you want to keep it alive as long as possible, equip it with a ghillie mask as it will get the camouflage buff as well, this will help it stay hidden if accidentally dropped.

Like Kairuku and Dimetrodons, Otters can provide insulation based on their damage status. They are, however, easier to tame and can be carried on shoulder opposed to Dimetrodons, with a smaller hitbox than both the other two while retaining a good insulation capacity, so it's possibly to easily gather as many as 12 around a single egg.

On the con side, their insulation AoE is quite small, so hatching multiple eggs might require a ton of them, wasting creature slots. They have a very low Food stat as well, moreover they are mammals and thus cannot have their genetics stored in the form of eggs inside fridges, so stay ready to feed them fish every 4-5 days.

Otters also act like structure storage units, so one can use them to carry as many Artifacts as it wants.

Level up Melee Damage for portable ACs and living scarfs, Weight for Artifact backpacks and Food as a security measure on breeding stock.

Idk if this is a bug or what but it seems that otters tame meter does not decrease.

I was taking an otter one time on the island pve official and forgot where it went and lost sight it.

Few days later found it in around the same area with the same progress as when I had left it.

I made quick work of taming it on the 2nd encounter.

======for ark:ultimate edition users======

In this version, you must consider 2 things:

Fish corpse and (prime) fish meat

(ptera,argy for grab)

Grab fish(don't know the correlation of the fish size and taming effectiveness but) and feed otter fish meat

Be prepare at least 10 fish meat for effectiveness decrease

(Wrote this because I failed to tame high lv otter before)