Free Republic

Some 20 pink dolphins were apparently poisoned and killed by poachers in Bazagan Lagoon in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, the Lima press said Saturday. According to the daily La Republica, these pink dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) are believed to have been poisoned by fishermen to keep them from damaging their fishing nets. The bodies of the cetaceans, between adults and young specimens 2 to 3 meters (6 1/2 to 10 feet) long, were found floating in Bazagan Lagoon, Requena province, in the northeastern region of Loreto, the Lima daily said. La Republica said on Saturday that the pink dolphins...

Actress Hayden Panettiere has been involved in a violent confrontation with Japanese fishermen as she tried to disrupt their annual dolphin slaughter.

Every year on the first of September, in a small town called Taiji on the southeast coast of Japan's Honshu Island, a new fishing season begins: the dolphin season. Twenty-six fishermen in 13 boats corral a few dozen dolphins into a small cove, where they kill the animals by stabbing them repeatedly with long harpoons and knives. The 50-square-foot (4.6-square-meter) inlet turns crimson, as if filled only with blood. In the course of a six-month season, fishermen kill roughly 2,000 dolphins and sell the meat to local supermarkets for about U.S. $500 a dolphin. The fishermen supplement their income by...

New evidence from unmanned underwater cameras has proved that dolphins are only pretending to be friendly to humans and that the moment that our backs are turned, a sour and indignant expression returns to their faces. The discovery, which will traumatise animal lovers the world over, was made when Californian marine biologist Mike Varney sensed that the smiling, chattering manner of dolphins and porpoises was somehow a little insincere. He set up a series of remote controlled underwater cameras to record ceteceans interacting with swimmers and divers and then filmed the same dolphins as they left their human companions. ‘It’s...

An enraged dolphin has been terrorising the French Atlantic coast for several weeks, attacking boats and knocking fishermen into the sea. "He's like a mad dog," said Henri Le Lay, president of the association of fishermen and yachtsmen of the port of Brezellec, in Brittany. "He has caused at least 1,500 euros ($2,530) worth of damage in the past few weeks." The dolphin, named Jean Floch, has destroyed rowboats, overturned open boats, flooded engines and twisted mooring lines. Two fishermen were knocked into the sea after the dolphin overturned their boat. Jean Floch has been a popular and familiar sight...

A team of scientists has identified a new dolphin species - the first for at least 30 years - off north Australia. The mammals - named snubfin dolphins - were initially thought to be members of the Irrawaddy species, also found in Australian waters. But one researcher found the snubfins were coloured differently and had different skull, fin and flipper measurements to the Irrawaddys. DNA tests confirmed that they were two distinct species. The researcher, Isabel Beasley of James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, said that because they live in shallow waters, both types face the same threats to their...

TOKYO — Japanese researchers said Sunday that a bottlenose dolphin captured last month has an extra set of fins that could be the remains of back legs, a discovery that may provide further evidence that ocean-dwelling mammals once lived on land. Fishermen captured the four-finned dolphin off the coast of Wakayama prefecture (state) in western Japan on Oct. 28, and alerted the nearby Taiji Whaling Museum, according to museum director Katsuki Hayashi.

Four-finned Japanese dolphin an evolutionary throwback, researchers say   Divers with the four-finned dolphin. (Mainichi) A bottlenose dolphin captured last month off western Japan has an extra set of fins, providing further evidence that ocean-dwelling mammals once had four legs and lived on land, Japanese researchers said Sunday.Fishermen netted the four-finned dolphin off the coast of Wakayama Prefecture on Oct. 28, and alerted the nearby Taiji Whaling Museum, according to museum director Katsuki Hayashi.The second set of fins -- much smaller than the dolphin's front fins -- are about the size of adult human hands and protrude from near the...

The first species to be erased from this planet’s great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin. It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China. On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji’s only known...

The Yangtze River dolphin enjoys a rare and depressing distinction, according to new research. The grey white, long-beaked animal is the world's first cetacean -the order of whales, dolphins and porpoises -to be made extinct by man, concludes an international team that has conducted comprehensive surveys of its habitat. The demise of the near-blind mammal also represents the first extinction of a large vertebrate (backboned animal) for more than 50 years, since overhunting claimed the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. A zoologist said it was a "shocking tragedy." The paper, lead-authored by Dr Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society...

It's sleek, fast, cute — and pink. A charter-boat captain from Lake Charles, La., photographed a rare pink dolphin a couple of weeks ago in Calcasieu Lake, an estuary just north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern Louisiana. According to Calcasieu Charter Service's Web site, Capt. Erik Rue was on the lake June 24 with fishing customers when five dolphins came into view — four normal-looking gray ones, and a bright pink one that appeared to be an adolescent. There is a species of pink dolphin that lives in the Amazon River in South America, but this one appears...

DHAKA (AFP) — An extremely rare river dolphin has been beaten to death by fishermen in southern Bangladesh. Fishermen at Mongla, near the Sunderbans mangrove forest, netted a Ganges river dolphin on Monday and beat it to death as they had not seen this kind of creature before, the state-run BSS news agency said Tuesday. A group then tried to sell it as a rare fish, before giving up and dumping it outside a museum. The Sunderbans area straddles the borders of Bangladesh and India's West Bengal state and lies on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. According to the World Wildlife Fund,...

The world's only pink Bottlenose dolphin which was discovered in an inland lake in Louisiana, USA, has become such an attraction that conservationists have warned tourists to leave it alone. Charter boat captain Erik Rue, 42, photographed the animal, which is actually an albino, when he began studying it after the mammal first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southwestern USA. Capt Rue originally saw the dolphin, which also has reddish eyes, swimming with a pod of four other dolphins, with one appearing to be its mother which never left its...

Breitbart TV

(Long, detailed article; I've provided the first page here.) MURKY water, hazy sky and dull brown riverbanks. Strained eyes peering into the mist. Ears tuned electronically into the depths. And with each hour, each day that passes, a nagging question that grows louder: is this how a species ends after 20 million years on earth? When they write the environmental history of early 21st-century China, the freshwater dolphin expedition now plying the Yangtze river may be seen as man's farewell to an animal it once worshipped. A team of the world's leading marine biologists is making a last-gasp search for...

Beijing, China, Dec 15: An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team`s leader saying one of the world`s oldest species was effectively extinct. The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction. A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China but not in sufficient numbers to...