SUKKUR, Pakistan: Local legend has it that Pakistan’s Indus River dolphin was once a woman, transformed by a curse from a holy man angry that she forgot to feed him one day.
After thousands of years swimming the mighty river the gentle, blind mammal is under threat from a combination of uncontrolled fishing and damage to its habitat caused by man-made dams.
Conservationists are fighting to save the dolphin as well as the river’s black spotted turtle, at risk from poachers who hunt it to sell to collectors and traditional medicine dealers.
The dolphin, which can grow up to 2.5 metres, is one of the world’s rarest mammals, with a population of just 1,400 living scattered along a 1,200km stretch of the Indus, which rises in the Himalayas and flows out into the Arabian Sea near Karachi.
They are classed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list of threatened species, which says the population has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1944. Functionally blind, they use echolocation — a form of natural sonar — to find fish, shrimp and other prey in the muddy river waters. Sticking their snouts and heads from the waters, the dolphins bring serenity to the river in the shadow of the Sukkur Barrage, built by the British, around 470 km north of Karachi.
The monsoon season draws families and picnickers hoping to catch a glimpse of the dolphins.
But the series of dams and barrages built across the Indus since the late 19th century to help irrigate farmland have divided the dolphin’s habitat into 17 separate sections. The dolphin has died out in 10 of these sections, according to a recent study published in the PLoS One journal by experts from Britain’s St Andrews University, and the sub-populations are left more vulnerable by their isolation.
AFP
