“The nets are our main concern,” says marine biologist Fernando Trujillo, who has spent more than 30 years researching the South American river dolphins and accompanied Peschak on the expedition. “Every year, in a small area in Colombia alone, we have more than 700 dolphins dying because of the nets,” says Trujillo, who is a member of the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical, and Natural Sciences.
In 1993, Trujillo founded the Omacha Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to studying and protecting the Amazon basin and its diverse species, including river dolphins. Together with other non-profits and research institutions, the Omacha Foundation is part of the South American River Dolphin Initiative (SARDI), a collaborative regional effort that promotes the conservation of these animals. Since 2017, the consortium has surveyed over 90,000 miles (144, 840km) of rivers in seven countries.
In partnership with fishermen and local communities, Trujillo’s team is conducting health assessments of river dolphins in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. In under 15 minutes, they capture the dolphins and move them to a wooden mat onshore, where they weigh and measure them, collect blood samples for tests, and sometimes perform ultrasound scans to check for pregnancy and tag them with GPS tracking devices.
The team has found that many dolphins are contaminated with microplastics and mercury, which is used in illegal gold mining in the Amazon, Trujillo explains. In Brazil, they have seen many animals with lung problems due to the increasing fires in the rainforest, often lit by farmers to open space for cattle and plantations.
