This naturalist found a snake Singapore hadn't seen in 106 years

In 2020, Seek Sophie host Dennis was out in a patch of Singapore forest when he spotted something extraordinary: a Selangor mud snake.

It might not sound earth-shattering. But the last confirmed record of this snake in Singapore was from 1914.

For 106 years, its status here had remained “indeterminate”. Essentially, we weren't sure whether it still existed in Singapore at all. Dennis's find finally confirmed that it did.

What makes this even more remarkable is that Dennis didn't become a naturalist through the usual route. He had no wildlife mentor showing him where to look, no established network to get him into the field, and no blueprint for turning his obsession with animals into a career.

He mostly figured it out by himself. And the way he did that was incredibly simple: he just went outside a lot!

He basically taught himself in the forest

Dennis had always gravitated towards wildlife, even when his life seemed to be heading somewhere else.

He studied veterinary bioscience before doing a degree in marketing. While studying, he ran fishing charters, where he learnt to read weather and tides and understand the habits of local fish. At 21, he became a divemaster and began guiding scuba dives, learning how to spot and identify marine life underwater.

But there weren't many obvious ways into a wildlife career in Singapore at the time. Dennis didn't have the university connections or mentors that could help him navigate the local wildlife scene. So he built his own education.

I went out on my own, almost every day, every night, just spotting and observing animals out in the wild.

For years, he spent an extraordinary amount of his free time in Singapore's forests, coasts and green spaces. He would look for animals, photograph them, read about what he'd seen and then head out again.

Even his photography was self-taught. His dad gave him a DSLR when he was around 17, and Dennis simply started messing around with it until he got better.

There was no grand career plan behind any of this. He was just really, really curious.

He loves the animal everyone fears

Of everything Dennis could have become obsessed with, he chose perhaps Singapore's least popular animal. Snakes.

Most of us see one and immediately start moving in the opposite direction. Dennis wants to know everything about it.

Part of the fascination is precisely because snakes are so misunderstood. They're often treated as scary, dangerous or disgusting before anyone stops to understand what they're actually doing.

Finding one also requires much more than knowing its name. “Is it arboreal or terrestrial? What does it eat? When does it move? How does it fit into the ecosystem around it?”

To Dennis, that's the fun part. You have to understand an animal's world before you have much chance of finding it. And after years of doing exactly that, one night he found something almost nobody expected to see.

Then he found the snake that had been missing for 106 years

The Selangor mud snake wasn't found during a grand scientific expedition.

Dennis was doing what he'd been doing for years: going out on his own, looking closely and seeing what was there.

In 2020, he spotted the snake whose last Singapore record dated back to 1914. The rediscovery attracted media attention, including a story in The Straits Times. Suddenly, far more people were finding Dennis and wanting him to take them into Singapore's wild spaces.

Until then, he had been guiding on a very small scale while working as a lab technologist, a flexible job that gave him time to keep building his wildlife work on the side.

Now, the thing he'd spent years doing almost obsessively in his free time was becoming a real career. More people started seeking him out for wildlife walks, and his work as a naturalist started to grow.

Finding animals turned out to be easier than finding guides

As bookings grew, Dennis couldn't lead every walk himself. He needed a team. That introduced an entirely different challenge for him.

Knowing a lot about animals wasn't enough. Dennis needed people who were genuinely curious about wildlife, but who could also read a group, communicate well and turn ecological knowledge into a story someone actually wanted to listen to.

“It's not just about knowing species names.”

A great guide needs to know when to explain something, when to let people observe quietly, how to keep someone's attention and how to make them care about an animal they might previously have ignored.

Dennis is particular about that. He wants his wildlife walks to feel consistently good no matter who leads it, and training people to that standard took years.

Today, the team has grown far beyond one guy wandering through the forest with a camera. But the point of the walks hasn't really changed.

The stargazer fish that went viral

The mud snake wasn’t the last time Dennis found something unexpected.

A few years later, during an intertidal walk, Dennis and his team came across a stargazer fish — a strange-looking creature buried beneath the sand with only its eyes and mouth visible. It was the kind of animal that was fascinating to some, but deeply unsettling to others.

The clip went viral, reaching over 66 million views on Instagram.

And there have been many since: a mother-and-pup pair of pangolins, one of the few known live sightings of a butterfly ray in Singapore waters, and a Peter’s cuboid snake — only the second live sighting ever recorded here!

The best sighting is when someone suddenly cares

But when we asked Dennis about the moments that had affected him most, he didn't talk about finding another rarity. He talked about people.

Someone coming up after a walk and saying: “I didn't know we had this.” Or a student suddenly becoming fascinated by an animal they'd barely noticed before. That's the part he cares about.

Dennis and his team of naturalists now runs wildlife walks around Singapore, from birdwatching and intertidal walks to looking for Singapore's flying lemurs.

On each one, the animals are only half the point.

Dennis wants people to slow down long enough to understand what they're looking at: how an animal behaves, what it eats, what threatens it and why it belongs here.

His dream is for Singaporeans to know what's living beside us

Singapore is incredibly easy to experience without really seeing its wildlife.

We move quickly. Our surroundings feel controlled and urban. A snake appearing somewhere can become an inconvenience to remove rather than an animal whose behaviour we're curious about.

Dennis wants that to change.

He points to places like Australia and Japan, where knowing the animals around you feels more like part of everyday life. His dream is for Singaporeans to develop that same familiarity here.

Not just: There's a snake. But: I know what snake that is. I know what it eats. I know why it's here.

For Dennis, curiosity is the beginning of conservation. “There's so much life sharing this island with us. Once people start noticing and learning, I'm hopeful they'll have a lot more appreciation for them as well.”

It's a surprisingly big idea to come from something as simple as looking more closely.

But Dennis is probably the best possible argument for it. Afterall, he spent years looking at animals most people walked straight past. And eventually he found one Singapore had missed for 106 years.

See Singapore's Wildlife with Dennis and his team!

We've always loved experiences that change how you see a place you thought you already knew, and Dennis' Seek Sophie wildlife walks do exactly that.

You don't need to fly to Borneo or go on safari to have an incredible wildlife encounter. Depending on the walk, you might find strange creatures on Singapore's shores, learn to spot birds you'd never noticed before, or discover that flying lemurs have been living above your head all along.

More importantly, you'll learn how to look. That's what Dennis taught himself all those years ago. And it's what he now hopes to pass on to everyone else.