Both the Indus River dolphin and the 'mohanna' are facing an uphill battle for survival.

 
SUKKUR, Pakistan (Asia Water Wire) -  “The day I see a dolphin die, a part of me dies with it. It’s like mourning for your own dead child,” says a weather-beaten Nazir Mir Bahar, originally a ‘mohanna’ (indigenous fishing community of the Indus) game watcher with the government’s Sindh Wildlife Department (SWD).

   Now 45, he has been on the Indus river since he can remember and cannot think of ever being away from it.

   His skin is wrinkly and leathery, and his eyes have the shape of a fish. “I was born on a boat and we lived on it. My father, Karam Illahi, was the first local fisherman hired by a renowned cetacean scientist, Georgio Pilleri, who did an intensive study of this mammal."

   Recalling how he would accompany his father on every trip for dolphin sightings since he was six or seven, he says: “Now I want to pass this skill on to my son, for who can feel for this harmless river creature the way a ‘mohanna’ can? Who knows the river the way we do?” he asks, not at all perturbed that his 12-year-old son Nadir, (who has seven siblings) sitting in the front is completely unschooled.

   However, like so many other people of his community, they have had to bid goodbye to their traditional occupation and lifestyle and come ashore to find other means of livelihood.

   “We owned as many as 200 boats and fishing was the only occupation we knew,” Nazir adds. The ‘mohanna’ have had to sell all their boats and bought a piece of land near the embankment where they live, under subhuman conditions and little education, trying to meet ends by working as daily wage earners. “There are some 100 households here,” he says, pointing to the bank. “Most have gone away to look for other means of livelihood.”

    There is a buzz of activity at the riverbank. Women are washing clothes, utensils, even bathing their young ones in the murky turbid water next to the makeshift toilets on stilts. A few yards away, a dozen or so submerged buffaloes are lazily sunning.      

   The Indus dolphin (Platanista gangetica minor) is a freshwater dolphin, known locally as ‘bhulan’. There are some 1,100 of them, according to a joint survey carried out in 2001 by the Worldwide Fund For Nature (WWF) - Pakistan. An endangered species on the IUCN’s Red List, the brownish-pinkish mammal has lived side by side the ‘mohanna’ since times immemorial.

   The other subspecies, the Ganges river dolphin (Platanista gangetica gangetica), are found in the Ganges and its tributaries as well as Brahmaputra, Meghna, Karnaphuli and Sangu river systems of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. Known as ‘susu’ in India, it is essentially identical to the Indus dolphin – its long, pointed snout thickens towards the end, and its upper and lower jaw sets of teeth are visible even when the mouth is closed.

   “Because the water is murky, over centuries the dolphin been rendered virtually blind. However, nature has endowed it with a terrific sonar system, so highly developed, that they can navigate and hunt for food using eco-location,” explains Hussain Bux Bhagat, a deputy conservator with Sindh Wildlife Department in Sukkur.

   He has been studying the dolphin for over a quarter of a century and since 1966 has been heading dolphin surveys in Sindh province, where the dolphin population is the highest.

DAMAGED HABITATS

   The dolphin is fighting a losing battle for survival.  “Big and small dams and irrigation barrages have shrunk their habitat further. Agricultural run-off, industrial waste are continuously being spewed into the river,” says the wildlife department’s Hussain Bhagat.

   Scarcity of water, less catch, licences given to affluent contractors who go for non-selective fishing methods (there is an increase in use of chemicals to benumb the fish so it comes on the surface) instead of preferring the indigenous community (who still practise traditional selective methods such as single hook and lines, cast-nets and seine nets) are all issues that have made it impossible for both man and the dolphin to fend for themselves,” he adds.

   River biodiversity was not given importance when the Indus irrigation system was developed.

   With talk of big dams on the Indus underway, experts say it is time to do environmental impact assessments to ascertain pre-development ecological conditions. Some environmentalists go so far as to say that if development projects undercut biodiversity, then these projects should be done away with.

   In the Sindh Wildlife Department’s latest survey to see the current trend in the dolphin population, carried out in April 2006, experts were able to spot 820 dolphins in the river and channels between the Guddu and kotri barrages (in Sindh), compared to 620 in 2001 in and around the same area.

   However, Bhagat adds that the provincial departments were unable to do a complete survey of Indus this year and had to skip the portion from Taunsa and Guddu where, in 2001, the department in collaboration of WWF had reported the sighting of 300 dolphins.

   “The survey could not be conducted due to the risk factor and lack of safety for our team,” he says.  According to Bhagat, many outlaws live around a large part of the riverine tract. These give protection to the timber mafia and land grabbers, and pose a serious kidnapping threat to surveyors, he explains.

   Along the river also reside some 15 to 20 tribal communities who have been clashing with each other and do not care too much for intruders. “We had to meet the notables of the tribes and assure them that we were not from any intelligence agency or against them but plain conservators trying to do our work quietly,” says Bhagat, who feels it is vital to get the support of the local people in conservation efforts.

   Absurd though it seems, another survey is being carried out by the WWF as well, although this is being carried out after five years, when it had sought the help of SWD.

   “It is not a separate survey. The current survey of SWD was part of one of their outputs of a project funded by the Sindh government and it is only limited to a particular stretch, whereas WWF is looking for the entire stretch of dolphin habitat,” explains Dr Ejaz Ahmed, deputy director general of WWF.  “Our current survey is being carried out with other partners including the SWD so we are.”

   “The cause is the same, to protect the creature,” agrees Bhagat. The two groups have in the past carried out collaborative rescue missions regularly.

   The dolphins stray into these narrow channels during monsoons when the canal gates are opened to maintain the flow at the barrages. “These dams have had a great impact on the dolphin population as it has curtailed the free movement of the creature. The population is now divided into five groups, leading to fragmentation of the population and inbreeding and eventually infertility and thus extinction,” Bhagat adds. 

RESCUE MISSIONS

   Some headway has been made in recent years.  In the five years since receiving a small grant from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the wildlife department partnered with the WWF and has rescued 75 dolphins, of which 56 were safely put back into the river. Now the department is looking for more funds to continue its rescue missions.

   “Perhaps one way to resolve the issue of fragmentation of the dolphin population is to try and take the rescued dolphins, preferably a male, and release it upstream Guddu. However, this would be a very risky venture and we’d have to use a helicopter as the dolphin would not be able to survive a road journey,” Bhagat explains.

   While the wildlife department is unable to fund such an experiment, Bhagat is eyeing the WWF’s new wetlands project, which has resources for a research and conservation component.

 

   “Our surveys are 200 percent accurate as we have experts who have doing surveys for the last twenty years,” says Bhagat confidently.  “Earlier we had the experience and the expertise, but not the equipment. Now we have both -- the experienced manpower and state-of-the art global positioning system that can pinpoint exactly where the dolphins were seen, to do a survey of about 690 kilometres of the river in 15 days.”

   The Indus river dolphins can never be held in captivity outside these waters, says

Bhagat. “They just cannot survive outside the Indus, it’s impossible, unless the water they live in is murky, turbid and of the same temperature as of the Indus,” he says.

   The Pakistani government gifted noted cetacean scientist Georgio Pilleri three dolphins in the 1980s. He took them to Switzerland, but they did not survive for more than three months. Some dolphins were taken to China and Britain, but met the same fate.  

   Pakistan has ratified the International Convention on Biodiversity, which protects threatened species. Likewise, a South Asian River Dolphin Workshop, held in 1999 in Lahore, led to the nomination of two areas as an Indus dolphin reserve.