Punjab bats for conservation of Indus river dolphin
- The census of one of the world’s most threatened cetaceans, the Indus river dolphin is all set to commence in the winter as part of a project by the Centre.
- Punjab’s wildlife preservation wing has gone a step ahead to not only protect the dolphins but also their natural habitat.
- The Indus river dolphin was declared the State aquatic animal of Punjab in 2019.
- The Indus river dolphin (Platanista gangetica minor) is a freshwater dolphin that is found in river Beas of Punjab .
- It is also known as the bhulan in Urdu and Sindhi, is a species of toothed whale in the family Platanistidae.
- It is endemic to the Indus River basin of Pakistan, with a small remnant population in the Beas river in India.
- This dolphin was the first discovered side-swimming cetacean.
- It is patchily distributed in five small, sub-populations that are separated by irrigation barrages.
- From the 1970s until 1998, the Ganges River dolphin (Platanista gangetica) and the Indus dolphin were regarded as separate species; however, in 1998, their classification was changed from two separate species to subspecies of a single species
- The Indus river dolphin is classified as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and, until recently, it was believed that these dolphins were endemic to Pakistan.
- But in 2007, a remnant but viable population of Indus dolphins was discovered in Punjab’s Harike wildlife sanctuary and in the lower Beas river.