Color me a pessimist but I suspect the dolphins are not going to be the winners in this case . . . Canadian scientists race to save Taiwan’s rare pink dolphins . . . “hopes that the endangered designation will increase pressure on the Taiwanese government to protect the dolphins’ habitat, which is ringed by coal-fired power plants and plastics factories” . . . I know it sucks and the recent dolphin die-offs in Taiwan have been tragic but fisheries, power, and factories tend to win here . . .

A group of Canadian DNA researchers is racing to identify a tiny surviving group of pink humpback dolphins resident near Taiwan as a unique species so it can be declared critically endangered. Fewer than 100 of the uniquely coloured dolphins remain in the waters off Taiwan’s west coast and many of them are badly battered and scarred from run-ins with fishing nets and boats, Trent University researcher Bradley White said. The Trent group believes only quick action will prevent these dolphins from going the way of the Yangtze River dolphin, which was declared effectively extinct after a six-week search late last year failed to turn up a single specimen. White and his colleagues told a symposium in south Taiwan in September that they believe the Taiwan group is a distinct species from the humpback dolphins that inhabit the Pearl River estuary and in isolated pockets off the coast of China. “The unique pigmentation on the dorsal fins suggests that they have not exchanged DNA with other populations for a very long time, probably on the order of several hundred years,” White said. The DNA analysis should be complete within three months. “Their numbers and genetic uniqueness means they satisfy the criteria for being critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.” White hopes that the endangered designation will increase pressure on the Taiwanese government to protect the dolphins’ habitat, which is ringed by coal-fired power plants and plastics factories. An unreleased draft of the report from the September symposium identified five major threats to Taiwan’s pink dolphins: reduced river flow into estuaries, habitat loss, entanglement in fishing gear, pollutants and underwater noise.

I really wish I could say that the pink dolphins are not going the way of the Yangtze River Dolphin, but commercial concerns often outweight environmental ones here.