Heeding The Call Of The Ganges River Dolphin

Ravindra Sinha did not even see the Ganges until he was seven. That year his grandmother died. To complete the rites of life and death, her body had to be taken to the sacred river, 75 kilometers north of their native village. Trudging through the crowds of Patna, the family arrived at a ghat and proceeded with the ceremony. While the young boy stood waiting, a dark shape appeared on the surface of the river. A local relative told him it was a sons and that many people were afraid of it. “Do not wade beyond a certain depth,” he was warned, “or the sons will grab you and pull you under.” The animal, of course, was a river dolphin, sons being but one of its many local names.
            Despite the warning, Sinha came to the river every other year for various reasons and invariably looked for this animal. In time, he enrolled at Patna Science College, hard by the water’s edge, and he would often go to the bank to sit or to take a bath. This was long before the bridge was built. Sinha would watch the ferry come and go and would sometimes board it just to be on the water. Invariably, he would see 10 to 20 of these aquatic animals close to the ferry or following a steamer. After graduation, Sinha lectured for a while in Munger, some 150 kilometers downstream, Susus could be seen tell him much about them.
            There were beautiful islands nearby – huge, monolithic rocks jutting out of the water. A palace had been built on one of these islands, and Sinha liked to sit there at the end of the day, gazing out at the water and at the vast alluvial plain dotted with farmhouses built of brick thatch, and clay. They reminded him of his native village, with borders of mango and palm trees, where water buffaloes waded in drained paddies and bleating goats pulled at their entangled tethers when the sun set, an orange ball drowning in the haze from hearth fires fuelled by dried dung patties. Through the changing seasons, almost anything could be grown there: fruits, vegetables, and grains to feed millions.
            Sinha Returned to university as a faculty member and also enrolled in a Ph.D. program in limnology. For the next few years, he spent as much time on the river as he could, studying its physical and chemical characteristics, its plankton and its complex hydrology. Once in a while, he could remember the susu and, looking up from his sampling gear, wonder why he did not see them more often. He asked the fisher who provided him with fish specimens for his studies. All they could tell him was that the animals were not so numerous as before. Then early in 1988, a fisher brought Sinha a dead dolphin that had drowned in his net. Although Sinha was not a specialist, he decided to dissect it, there and then. It was a fateful decision. He realized immediately that he was in the presence of a mammal, and from then on, he could not let go. Some how, after all, he had been pulled in by the sons.
At about the same time, half a world away on the shores of the St. Lawrence River, I was examining yet another carcass of a beluga whale. Already, the team I had coordinated had unraveled a gruesome story of animals dying of cancer and a population threatened by the effects of pollution on its reproduction. This was the legacy of decades of neglect in the huge basin of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Other research had shown that these same chemicals traveled far and wide from their site of use or release and ended up in unexpected place, even contaminating belugas that lived in the Arctic. This was partly due to a phenomenon called the grasshopper effect, whereby chemicals vaporize in warm climates and condense back to earth in colder latitudes. Season after season, toxics thus travel in successive jumps all the way to arctic regions. DDT, although banned in North America for more than two decades, is still measurable in the atmosphere over the Arctic. Some is old DDT, “recycled” by atmospheric transport from the heart of North America. Much is more recent, arriving from other countries, like India, where it is still in use today.
Sinha was not long in realizing that the fish caught at Patna contained measurable amounts of PCB’s and pesticides such as DDT. Although levels f these chemicals in tropical Asian rivers are generally lower than the historic high reached in Great Lakes fish, the Ganges at Patna was turning up fish with the highest loads. It was worrying, since many of these chemicals can be concentrated dramatically as they move through the food chain and accumulate in fatty tissues. Sinha obtained dolphin carcasses from fishers and had them analyzed. As he had suspected, their blubber was tainted with PCB's and pesticides. Surprisingly, though their levels in the same range as in arctic belugas, even though the dolphins lived right next to industry and farmlands where chemicals were being used.
These puzzling findings were what brought me to meet with Dr. Sinha. Strangely, science seemed to be providing some support for a belief widely held in India that the Ganges is self-cleaning and purifying. As scientists, Sinha and I could think only in terms of mechanism that would explain such a possibility and try to come up with ways to investigate them. Perhaps the high productivity of the tropical -river system turned the chemicals over faster and the monsoons helped in flushing them out to sea? Or perhaps recent practice in the Gangatic plain and the higher levels could be expected in the future? Or may be huge amounts of pesticides were being airlifted to a cold sink only 300 kilometers north of Patna: the snow and glaciers of Himalayas. If that was the case, the chemicals would show up in the river again, although decades, if not centuries, later.
Much also remained to be investigated about the dolphins themselves. Perhaps the method for determining their age had been inappropriate, and the animals sampled were not so old as thought. Indeed, river dolphin research was only in its infancy. Sinha spent several years trying to convince Indian authorities to give him the mandate and funds for a comprehensive study. When finally granted both, he launched a series of surveys, drifting in a small fishing pirogue from the foothills of the Himalayas to beyond Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal. He was relived to find out that the dolphins were still relatively widespread and that there were at least several hundred individuals. He also saw that what was happening to the river made their future uncertain. The immediate threat was not so much toxic chemicals as direct and indirect captures by fishers, who were taking the dolphins for their oil, mostly as an attractant for fish. Sinha campaigned in towns and schools, met with groups of fishers, and developed an alternative product made from fish viscera.
            He and other researcher also observed that, as elsewhere on the continent, fishing and human encroachment were destroying fish and dolphin habitat. Dams split once contiguous streams into isolated segments, destroyed habitat locally, and made some downstream channels shallow and inaccessible to dolphins in the dry season. Farmers were tilling the flood plain all the way to the water’s edge, leading to increased siltation as soon as the rain came. Almost, everywhere water was being pumped out from the river for irrigation and the other purposes, while human and urban wastes flowed freely. Simply put, since Sinha's childhood, India had been developing and growing, and there were far more people in the valley then when he had taken his deceased grandmother to the river. And there were many more deaths as well. Today, in addition to those who are incinerated on shore and on rafts, more than 45000 human corpses are ritually set adrift on the Ganges every year.
Soon after my arrival at Patna, Sinha took me to his special place on the Ganges, the stretch of water that includes the striking rocky islands where he had spent many hours watching the river years before. As a result of his team's effort, the area is now a declared reserve for river dolphins. In a three -day survey, close to 8o dolphins were observed here, about the same as in previous years, showing that the reserve was a good step in the right direction.
One day as we drifted on the Ganges, we heard music and voice from shore. A noisy party of boys and young men was boarding a rented wooden boat at ghat. For the past several days and nights all over India, people had been celebrating goddess Saraswati, consort of Brahma. Hundreds of idols had been made of wooden stems laced into human figures; which had then been covered with clay and painted bright colours. Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge and learning, and her worship used to be restricted to students, but in some parts of the country, celebrations have now become an excuse for loud partying. Idols are exhibited on decorated platforms at street corners, and hooligans request donations from passerby while loudspeakers incessantly broadcast the latest hits of Hindi pop music.
This night, exhausted and satiated worshippers were bringing their Saraswatis to be immersed in the river with flowers and offerings. All along the Ganges, thousands of such groups were re-enacting an age-old tradition. When thrown in, the idols sink at once, but the paint and clay wash away, and the skeletons of twigs and reeds return to the surface. We had seen a few dolphins that afternoon among the fishing canoes and rented boats. But we had seen many more puppets, with tiny arms and legs that looked like human children. They reminded me of the more personal motives that had brought me to India, of my childhood bond with my own river and its once plentiful white whales. And of a more recent consciousness of the smallness of our world and of how all things are connected. And I remembered how, a few days earlier, Sinha had told me about the birth of the sacred Ganges River and its fauna in Hindu mythology.
              “The river descended from heaven to earth" he had said,” in a great procession winding down the land of India. In front was Bhagiratha in his robes and penance, and after him came the river with myriads of fishes, turtles, frogs, and leaping dolphins." In time, the flood plain became the lifeblood of a civilization, and 2,300 years ago, the great emperor Asoka, who reigned over the land of the Ganges, posted an edict in his capital on the very site where Patna now stands. The edict listed the animals that were not to be killed throughout his realm, and the river dolphin was among them.
     The species is once again protected under current Indian law. Yet many river dolphins are still being killed, intentionally or not, and no one knows where it will stop. Protection of the dolphins must be enforced immediately throughout the watershed , and all must come to recognize that the health of the dolphins is dependent on that of the rivers that gives us material as well as spiritual life.