Rare sight: School of dolphins sighted off Gwadar

3,000 to 5,000 spinner dolphins were spotted over an area spanning 3km.

KARACHI:

A school of the world’s friendliest creatures put on a rare show recently in the Arabian Sea off Gwadar – providing a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a handful of lucky witnesses.

Around 3,000 to 5,000 spinner dolphins were found spanning over an area of approximately three square kilometres in offshore waters near Gwadar on December 15. The sighting was recorded by a team of the World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P).

“The dolphins appeared very healthy, agile and playful as about 15 of them were riding the bow of the survey vessel, while others were performing all sorts of acrobatics, including breaches, half breaches, head and tail slaps, spins and fast proposing,” said Muhammad Shoaib Kiani, a cetacean scientist at WWF-P.

The dolphins stayed with the slow moving vessel for nearly two hours, during which WWF-P researchers gathered information on their size, behaviour, and composition.

“Amazingly, many calves and juveniles were observed by the scientists during this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Some Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins were also recorded during the survey,” Kiani added.

The scientist, who happens to be Pakistan’s first environmentalist who is completing a PhD on marine whale and dolphins in the country, stressed the need to assess the human impact on the fragile ecosystem and come up with solutions.



Kiani said that illegal nets were being used by fishermen. “The length of a net should not exceed 2.5 kilometres; yet, our fishermen use nets as long as 15 to 20 kilometres, which is a violation of international law,” he added.

“Issues such as use of extremely long gillnets, pollution, habitat degradation, ship and boat strikes and dwindling food resources as a result of illegal fishing methods need our purposeful and well coordinated efforts for finding viable solutions,” Moazzam Khan, a WWF-P marine consultant, said.

“The health of seas are measured by the presence of dolphins and this recent survey proved that we have a vibrant sea that has food for these animals; but we have to figure where and why these animals are being killed,” Khan added.

Around 1,000 to 2,000 dolphins were sighted offshore in Karachi in 2006 and almost the same quantity was observed in Ormara, Balochistan, in 2007. While Pakistan’s sea is internationally considered as unfit for animals, Kiani claimed that this was merely due to an information gap. Pakistan has a range of animals and Balochistan is rich in resources,” he added.



The WWF-P is currently involved in two projects on whales and dolphins in Pakistani waters under its marine programme. Both programmes are funded under the Australian government’s Indo-Pacific Cetacean Research and Conservation Fund and are aimed at the conservation of marine cetaceans along the Balochistan coast and assessment of cetacean by-catch in tuna fisheries of Pakistan, respectively.

Meanwhile, another major highlight of the field trip was when an entangled juvenile humpback whale was rescued from a fish net on December 11 near the Gunz area of the Balochistan coast.

The local community managed to release the animal through instructions given to them by the WWF-P on the phone. “This is another great achievement considering the fact that Arabian Sea humpback whales have been declared endangered in 2008 by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and the existing number of this species is very low,” Kiani said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2012.