Olivia
from Bolivia
This pink dolphin looks cute—but don’t be fooled by her smile! Olivia cleverly hides her anger and uses her intelligence to plot revenge against anyone who harms her friends and family.
It’s nearly impossible to escape from her thanks to her remarkable echolocation power: using deflected sound waves to hunt and navigate in the dark Amazon River.
Pink Dolphin Rescue
Amazingly, freshwater dolphins exist. In Bolivia, pink river dolphins live in the winding rivers of the Amazon basin. But each year, more of these incredible animals become stranded and die as river levels grow dangerously shallow. This year’s record-setting drought is putting even more dolphins at risk. Dr. Enzo Aliaga Rossel recently oversaw the miraculous rescue of 26 stranded river dolphins and is now working urgently to prepare for more emergency rescues as conditions continue to worsen.
Video Transcript
They can be gray, white or bright pink. And the color comes from the capillary that goes near the surface of the skin. So when they have a lot of activity, they become pinker. Like playing, hunting, fishing, mating. It’s like when you make a lot of exercise, you start getting red and you know that’s how they they become so pink. For me, it’s amazing. The mother has to teach the baby somehow through this really muddy and dark waters of the Amazon rivers, how to survive, how what fish to hunt, what dangers to avoid. And that show us that they are very very smart. The babies stay with the mother for more than a year where they’re learning but also they’re drinking milk. They are mammals. So that creates a strong attachment between mother and the baby. So one difference between marine dolphins and rear dolphins is that they have this big forehead. This very prominent forehead full of fat that they use for sonar for navigation. It’s called the melon.
They create a sound that goes and bounces into the prey or trees or anything that is in the way, goes back and hits the melon. And that’s when they interpret all the information and they create this image in the brain. So they can navigate in darkness.
They’re very flexible and they can swim through the forest and move through the trees, make U-turns because their vertebbrates are not fused like marine dolphins. They’re a little bit loose. So that gives them this flexibility and that help them help
all these agricultural changes in the region. They’re changing the main rivers to become irrigation for the crops. So they are taking water from the rivers and the rivers are getting shallow and shallow and they get trapped.
When the rescue happened few years ago, we were able to rescue 26 dolphins. All of them were safe and at the end the all of them were in good shape. We have mother calves, babies all sizes and adults. So it was an entire population. So we went to this remote area by trucks and we had to capture the each individual and that was a lot of work and lot of trouble. So we have to take them out of the water, put them on a stretcher, take them to the tracks that we made nicer with mattresses for the dolphins. So we needed a lot of resources to act quickly. All this rescue in general has a very high cost. The cost of this operation was around $20,000 cuz we stayed there for 15 days with a big big team.
This year was one of the severest droughts in Bolivian history. So, Laaz, the capital of of Bolivia, run out of water. So, people has to make lines to get water. All this lack of rain is caused by climate change. All the glaciers in Bolivia are melting. So, the rivers are going to get and are getting lower and lower. I received information that dolphins are stranded or sometimes they’re dying in on some beaches in the in the rivers in very remote areas and there’s no money to go there. I don’t have the the team to to help me with that and I know that sadly they they died and that’s why we need this this money to to create an emergency fund to be able to react quickly as we receive the information that something is happening. call people, make a team, and go and rescue them. I would like to thank Endangered Species Revenge for all the help and support, and I’m asking you to help me to save the Bolivian pink river dolphin.
