Many decades later, in the1970s, an Italian naturalist, Dr Giorgio Pilleri spent months in the wilds of Pakistan studying Indus River dolphins. This view goes back to the 1800s when researchers concluded that on the whole, Indus and Ganges dolphins were pretty similar and were probably a single species. Treating them as one species also did not help efforts to conserve them. Brown, blind, with a long thin rostrum (snout) and thin interlocking teeth, swimming in a river two thousand kilometers from the sea: from the very beginning I was utterly captivated by these strange, ancient and mystical creatures. Although I was familiar with ocean dolphins, nothing prepared me for my first view of an Indus dolphin. Freshwater turtles lined the banks, river terns swooped along the water surface, and the eerie call of lapwings pierced the silence. Those first unforgettable views of the vast, calm, silent wilderness of winding interconnected river channels, fringed by white sand glistening under a beating sun are forever marked in my mind. Soon I’d made my way to the Indus river in Pakistan. I picked the Indus river dolphin, one of the most endangered dolphins in the world, and one of the least known, as a good place to start. It all began back in 1999, when I decided that I wanted to work on saving endangered dolphin species. Officially the dolphins’ are no longer sub-species of the South Asian river dolphin: they are separate species in their own right. A journey that took in two decades, the birth of my two children, and the measurement of virtually every available river dolphin skull from across south Asia. It was a mission that took me from the tranquil waters of the Indus in Pakistan, to the bustling banks of the Ganges river in India, and ended in the silent, airless rooms in museums across the world. Twenty years ago, I set off on a quest to understand whether the endangered dolphins in the Ganges river, and the dolphins in the Indus river were two separate species.
Two species now: Indus and Ganges river dolphins © Zahoor Salmi/WWF-Pakistan François Pelletier / WWF