Scientists at the Gujarat Ecological Education and Research (GEER) Foundation recorded 193 dolphins across 64 sightings in the southern Gulf of Kachchh during boat surveys run between October 2023 and February 2025. The finding was released around National Wildlife Day on 4 September as part of a wider assessment of marine mammals and seagrass around Narara and the neighbouring islands.
Dolphins made up 36.2 per cent of the 177 marine megafauna records logged in the survey, which counted 342 individual animals in total, as reported by IANS. That makes them the most frequently seen marine mammal in a gulf better known for its dugongs and its refineries.
The number that matters is not 193
A single large count would say little. What the survey team flagged instead is the distribution. Sightings repeated across Narara reef, the Dedeka-Mundeka island complex, Pirotan, Dhani and the coastal waters off Sikka, and they repeated across seasons, with 26 records in winter, 21 post-monsoon and 17 in summer, per Vibes of India’s account of the report. Animals passing through on migration do not turn up at the same reef margins in every season.
The researchers confirmed the Indian Ocean humpback dolphin, Sousa plumbea, a coastal species that conservation assessments list as endangered. They also said field observation could not pin the species for every sighting, and called for more systematic surveys before anyone draws population trends from the data.
Why Jamnagar’s coastline is a hard place to be a dolphin
The Marine National Park and Sanctuary here was India’s first protected area of its kind, and it sits inside one of the country’s densest concentrations of port and petrochemical activity. Crude and product tankers work the jetties at Sikka and Vadinar. Fishing boats from Salaya, Okha and the Jamnagar coast work the same shallow waters that the survey found dolphins feeding in. The report singles out fishing and vessel movement as the activity that needs watching.
Humpback dolphins are more exposed to this than offshore species. They stay within a few kilometres of shore, in water shallow enough that a propeller strike or a gill net is a real risk, and they depend on the reef and seagrass systems that dredging and sedimentation degrade first. Seagrass meadows in the gulf also feed the dugong, which India protects under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act and which survives in only three pockets nationally.
What this changes for the district
A resident population is administratively different from a visiting one. Once a species is shown to breed and feed in a place year-round, the forest department has grounds to regulate boat speeds, seasonal access to specific reefs and the routing of small craft, rather than treating the gulf as open water with a park drawn on it. It also strengthens the case for the dolphin to become a draw for the eco-tourism that Jamnagar has built around bird-watching at Khijadiya and reef walks at Narara.
The constraint is evidence. GEER’s own recommendation is for continued surveys with species-level identification, which needs photo-identification of individual animals over several years and a budget line to match. Without that, the 193 stays a snapshot.
What to watch
The next signal will be whether the state forest department folds dolphin monitoring into the Marine National Park’s regular work plan alongside the existing dugong and turtle programmes, and whether the survey’s site list translates into any change in how boat traffic is managed near Pirotan and Narara.
Sources: IANS via Social News XYZ, Vibes of India
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.