Nazir Mirani, 47, is the third generation of a humble family committed to saving Pakistan’s blind dolphins, an endangered species swimming against a tide of manmade hazards.
“I treat them as my children and do everything whenever a dolphin is trapped in shallow waters,” said Mirani, once a fisherman and now among a handful of people officially assigned to protect the dolphins.
“No one can know them as meticulously as me. I was born in a boat and have been living with these fish ever since,” said the lanky Mirani, his complexion darkened by years under the burning sun and his chest puffed up with pride.
“Look at my eyes,” he said. “Aren’t they shaped like the fish?”
Indus dolphins — Platanista gangetica minor or bulhan in the local Sindhi language — are listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union.
According to local folklore, a lactating woman once refused to give milk to a saint, who cursed her and pushed her into the Indus. The woman turned into a dolphin and the freshwater species was born.
Females are bigger than males, weighing up to 110kg and growing up to 2.5m long.
The brownish-pink mammals have lived alongside humans for time immemorial. Their long, pointed snouts thicken at the end, and the upper and lower teeth are visible even when the mouth is closed.
Their numbers are declining as fishermen deplete their stock of food, pollution worsens and a network of barrages restricts their movements. Falling water levels because of declining rain and snowfall are another peril.
The Worldwide Fund For Nature Pakistan estimated in 2006 there were around 1,200 Indus dolphins left — 900 at a sanctuary near Sukkur in the southern province of Sindh and another 300 further upstream in Punjab.
The dolphin is blind because it lacks eye lenses and so hunts for catfish and shrimp using sophisticated sonar, said Hussain Bux Bhagat, a senior official in the Sindh wildlife department.
Dolphins swam freely in the Indus until about a century ago when engineers under British rule started slicing up the river with irrigation projects in the dry hinterland.
The barrages pose a critical threat to the dolphins, dividing their natural habitat into five separate segments of the snaking river.
“This species used to roam across 3,500km of the Indus but are now confined to 900km,” Bhagat said.
As a result the risk of inbreeding “could lead to infertility and then extinction,” Bhagat said.
An alarming increase in pollution from untreated sewage dumps, illegal pesticides and industrial and agricultural waste also threaten their survival.
The dolphins swim on their sides, trailing a flipper along the river bottom and can move in water as shallow as 30cm.
But each year up to 50 dolphins get trapped in the thousands of kilometers of irrigation channels, which are closed and left to dry out.
Fishermen used to kill them but awareness campaigns have improved to the extent that they now inform wildlife officials who come to their rescue.
“People were so uneducated they used to shoot the dolphins dead until a few years ago,” Bhagat said.
The trouble is that wildlife services have limited resources. Rescuers have just one van with a water tub, which they use to keep the dolphins alive for a few hours while they take them back to the river.
“We have successfully rescued 50 dolphins this season, but we could do it more efficiently if we get a helicopter,” Bhagat said.
IDENTITY: A sex extortion scandal involving Thai monks has deeply shaken public trust in the clergy, with 11 monks implicated in financial misconduct Reverence for the saffron-robed Buddhist monkhood is deeply woven into Thai society, but a sex extortion scandal has besmirched the clergy and left the devout questioning their faith. Thai police this week arrested a woman accused of bedding at least 11 monks in breach of their vows of celibacy, before blackmailing them with thousands of secretly taken photos of their trysts. The monks are said to have paid nearly US$12 million, funneled out of their monasteries, funded by donations from laypeople hoping to increase their merit and prospects for reincarnation. The scandal provoked outrage over hypocrisy in the monkhood, concern that their status
The United States Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday it plans to adopt rules to bar companies from connecting undersea submarine communication cables to the US that include Chinese technology or equipment. “We have seen submarine cable infrastructure threatened in recent years by foreign adversaries, like China,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement. “We are therefore taking action here to guard our submarine cables against foreign adversary ownership, and access as well as cyber and physical threats.” The United States has for years expressed concerns about China’s role in handling network traffic and the potential for espionage. The U.S. has
A disillusioned Japanese electorate feeling the economic pinch goes to the polls today, as a right-wing party promoting a “Japanese first” agenda gains popularity, with fears over foreigners becoming a major election issue. Birthed on YouTube during the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading conspiracy theories about vaccinations and a cabal of global elites, the Sanseito Party has widened its appeal ahead of today’s upper house vote — railing against immigration and dragging rhetoric that was once confined to Japan’s political fringes into the mainstream. Polls show the party might only secure 10 to 15 of the 125 seats up for grabs, but it is
The US Department of Education on Tuesday said it opened a foreign funding investigation into the University of Michigan (UM) while alleging it found “inaccurate and incomplete disclosures” in a review of the university’s foreign reports, after two Chinese scientists linked to the school were separately charged with smuggling biological materials into the US. As part of the investigation, the department asked the university to share, within 30 days, tax records related to foreign funding, a list of foreign gifts, grants and contracts with any foreign source, and other documents, the department said in a statement and in a letter to