But it’s expensive to do expeditions to monitor population trends.” “If we don’t know where the river dolphins are, we can’t say how bad is. “Fishing is a threat but we don’t have enough data,” he says. Marcelo Oliveira, a conservation specialist at World Wildlife Fund Brazil (WWF), agrees with that analysis. There aren’t strong enough laws to make fishermen report what they catch.” “We need better information on fishing practices. “There is a huge amount of ignorance,” she warns. But nothing has happened since, and the peak fishing season is due to begin in July.
Prosecutors in Amazonas state, where the Mamirauá Institute is based, originally asked for the moratorium which started in 2015, warning that as many as 2,500 dolphins were being killed illegally each year for bait.ĭa Silva reports that in November 2019 she met with officials from the Secretariat of Production of the State of Amazonas (SEPROR), to discuss the extension of the moratorium in Amazonas. Separate findings by da Silva published in 2018 revealed that the Amazon river dolphin population in Brazil is halving every decade.
“If the removal is higher the species does not have the capacity to replace itself.” “They are a very slow reproductive species,” da Silva notes. Due to that long gestation and nursing period, females only reproduce every three to five years. After that, the mother feeds a calf underwater for two years. Research by da Silva, published in 2017, found that a female dolphin’s pregnancy typically lasts 13 months. “Not all the objectives of the moratorium were fulfilled, therefore the moratorium must be extended,” she explained. Vera da Silva, a researcher for INPA, the Amazon research institute, who has been studying Amazonia’s dolphins for more than 30 years. “I believe could make them extinct,” warns Dr. Experts warn that the failure to extend it could lead to the extinction of the largest freshwater dolphin in the world - a fate that befell China’s Yangtze river dolphin ( Lipotes vexillifer ) in 2007, following years of overfishing, pollution and habitat degradation. In January 2015, under the government of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, that chronic criminal behavior led to the introduction of a five-year moratorium on catching piracatinga in order to better protect the dolphins.īut that moratorium ended earlier this year and has yet to be renewed by the Jair Bolsonaro administration, which is undermining many other of Brazil’s environmental laws. But for years, poachers have targeted the dolphins, using their fatty blubber as bait to catch a carnivorous catfish called piracatinga, which is drawn to the scent of rotting flesh. Occupying the Amazon and Orinoco river basins, which cut across the northern half of the South American continent, these freshwater mammals were historically abundant, and are protected today by Brazilian law it is illegal to kill them. Like other river dolphins, the boto communicates with variable whistle tones. An estimated population in the low tens of thousands is thought to exist in the wild, though counting the animals accurately in the Amazon’s murky streams is challenging. The Amazon river dolphin ( Inia geoffrensis) or boto, already classified as “endangered” since 2018 by the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is now coming under even more serious threat across Brazil and Latin America.
During highwater periods they penetrate deep into the rainforest using echolocation to search murky pools amid submerged tree roots for prey including dozens of fish species, turtles and freshwater crabs. “They are extremely intelligent and can display a complex set of behaviors, even like humans.” These skilled, sharp-toothed hunters, often reaching more than eight feet in length, are well adapted to shifting river levels. “They are very special creatures,” says Natanael dos Santos, a guide working at the Mamirauá Institute. Moments later the duo reappear on the other side of the Japurá River, playfully dovetailing, and skirting the edge of the várzea rainforest - a seasonal floodplain where, in this part of Amazonia, river levels can rise and fall by up to 12 meters (39 feet) a year, at times opening up vast swathes of rainforest to these graceful swimmers.
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