Endangered
Irrawaddy dolphin
Orcaella brevirostris
Irrawaddy dolphin is a mammal in the family Delphinidae (order Cetacea) — Orcaella brevirostris, recorded as Endangered and tied to Indonesia.
Appearance
The Irrawaddy dolphin's colour is grey to dark slate blue, paler underneath, without a distinctive pattern. The dorsal fin is small and rounded behind the middle of the back. The forehead is high and rounded. The beak is lacking.
It ranges in weight from 90 to 200 kg (200 to 440 lb) with a length of 2.3 m (7.5 ft) at full maturity.
Published measurements include mass about 123.5.
For example, the Malampaya population, first discovered and described in 1986, at the time consisted of 77 individuals.
Range and habitat
The Irrawaddy dolphin is an oceanic dolphin that lives in brackish water near coasts, river mouths, and estuaries. It has established subpopulations in freshwater rivers, among them the Ganges and the Mekong, as well as the Ayeyarwady River, from that it takes its name. Its range extends from the Bay of Bengal to New Guinea and the Philippines, although it does not appear to venture offshore.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
Although found in much of the riverine and marine zones of South and Southeast Asia, the only concentrated lagoon populations are found in Chilika Lake in Odisha, India, and Songkhla Lake in southern Thailand. Drowning in gillnets is the main threat to them throughout their range. The majority of reported dolphin deaths in all subpopulations are due to accidental capture and drowning in gillnets and dragnets, and in the Philippines, bottom-set crab nets.
In Burma, electrofishing, gold mining, and dam building are also serious and continuing threats. The practice of using explosives instead has become very popular and led to a steady decline of populations of fish, and especially the dolphins swimming in the area.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Irrawaddy dolphin is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Irrawaddy dolphin, Wikidata item Q273331. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
