Our research focus is collecting enough genetic and morphometric information to classify Araguaian River Dolphins’ as a new species. This is where the story begins.
Araguaian River dolphins are a species that barely show themselves on the surface of the water, but part of their back and dorsal thing are visible during diving and breathing movements. We decided to try genetics sampling techniques, using crossbow to sample Araguaian River Dolphins in the Tocantins River.
The Tocantins River is transparent with visibility of over one meter below which gave us the hope that would be easy to obtain samples, since we could predict animals movements, behaviors and hit the dorsal fin right on the target. But these animals are extremely flexible and intelligent, smart individuals. They made 360 degree turns underwater, observing us and predicting our movements. We felt they were monitoring us much more than we believed we were monitoring them.
It was even possible to identify different individuals, looking for different positions around our boat to access us. Because of this, they emerged far away from the boat, trying to avoid to be risked to be tagged.
After seven days of field work under a strong sun we managed to obtain five samples of these individuals, and we were considering this a huge victory, because it’s really complicated to sample these animals.
It was such an incredible space and beautiful landscape, but it’s very challenging, because this animal seems to be much more intelligent and smarter than we thought, and they were predicting how to respond to the boat movements day after day. We would look at this behavior and trying to predict how they would respond, but in the end, we just thought, we are not so very clever as we thought to be able to predict those movements.
-Dr. Mariana Paschoalini Frias
This post was adapted from a voice recording in the special World River Dolphin Day podcast episode of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
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