More than two decades after the animal had its moment in the spotlight as the mascot of the Hong Kong handover, scientists have come together to conserve the iconic marine mammal’s habitat
I have been waiting for weeks to get out on the water, but black rainstorms and typhoon warnings – signposts of Hong Kong’s capricious summer – kept my feet firmly, frustratingly on dry land. When I do eventually step aboard the boat chartered by the Hong Kong Cetacean Research Project (HKCRP) and the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society at Tung Chung one early June morning, the sky is a brilliant blue and the rising sun glares off the construction cranes reclaiming the sea for the airport’s third runway.
As we sail southwest along Lantau Island’s rugged, emerald coastline, Vincent Ho Chung-shun, a research associate with HKCRP, points towards the Macau skyline and the turbines of the Guishan Offshore Windfarm near Zhuhai, estimating visibility at about 40km – perfect conditions for observing Hong Kong’s marine mammals, he says, something the organisation has been doing since 1995.
Several times a week throughout the year, funded by the government’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD), HKCRP sets out to methodically survey Hong Kong’s waters to monitor the population of Chinese white dolphins – also known as pink dolphins for the blush colour they acquire as adults – and finless porpoises. According to conservation body WWF-Hong Kong, there has been an 80 per cent drop in dolphin abundance in Hong Kong waters over the past 15 years, all due to human interference.
“Unless we take deep, strong, urgent measures, you wouldn’t call extinction a threat, you would call it the most likely outcome,” says Laurence McCook, head of oceans conservation at WWF-Hong Kong.
“When we see any animals – any dolphins or porpoises – we record their position and other relevant information, how many there are, their age, what they are doing, and we will try and take pictures to identify them,” says Ho, whose exactitude gives way to emotion when speaking about the creatures to which he has devoted his career.
Asked whether he and the small team of researchers tasked with monitoring the cetaceans have named any of the animals, Ho laughs dismissively. “That’s too romantic,” he says. “We just give them a code. For example, if it was the first dolphin seen in west Lantau, it would be WL01.” Later, however, he admits to having some “old friends”, before rolling up the right sleeve of his shirt to reveal a tattoo of a Chinese white dolphin. “Like this one – Square Fin – her code was NL24 […] I can’t remember the last time I saw her, maybe 2015 or 2014. She disappeared, most likely she is dead.”
Ho believes Square Fin succumbed to old age, which makes her one of the lucky ones.
Forty minutes into the trip, off the northwest coast of Lantau, we spot a rose-flushed adult and a juvenile, whose skin is still a dark grey, as they approach the boat’s starboard side. The engines are cut and we watch as they frolic past, framed by the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge in the background.
To my untrained eyes, every distant whitecap could be a cresting dolphin. That is until one breaks the surface so gracefully I wonder how I could have confused a turbid wave with its sleek form. We count seven encounters over eight hours on the boat, with one pod containing up to eight animals, about 30 dolphins in total. The largest ones measure up to 2.5 metres in length, the young about a metre, and they weigh as much as 150kg, although their hydrodynamic form makes them appear slighter, more buoyant.
The dolphins feed, breach, spin and dive. I suggest they seem to be having fun, that they are enjoying not having to contend with the high-speed Macau ferries, which departed as frequently as every 20 minutes each way before being suspended until further notice because of the coronavirus. But I am reminded not to project human sentiments on the animals, that it is too early to tell whether the reduction in boat traffic has had any impact on their environment and how they interact with it.
Besides, the quieter waters have not stopped the dolphins from dying.
In the weeks I waited to board the boat, Ocean Park Conservation Foundation (OPCF), a research and conservation non-governmental organisation, attended four Chinese white dolphin strandings, washed up dead or doomed onto beaches around Hong Kong. Three of them were yet to reach adulthood.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which lists Sousa chinensis as “vulnerable”, the population is decreasing not only here but in all its native habitats, from China and Cambodia to Malaysia and Thailand. The most recent government estimates indicate an average of just 32 Chinese white dolphins left in Hong Kong’s waters – a historic low, down from 188 in 2003 – although as marine mammals with no respect for international borders they form part of a wider population, of about 2,000, which spans the Pearl River Delta, believed to be the largest remaining population.
“To me, it doesn’t matter if there are 2,000 dolphins or 200 dolphins,” says Dr Lindsay Porter from Taiwan, where she is working to save a critically endangered subpopulation of Chinese white dolphins. “The pressures on their environment – and that’s throughout the Pearl River estuary – are huge and we need to change that if we want to see the dolphins survive in the long term.”
A marine biologist and the convenor of the small cetaceans subcommittee of the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Porter became the first scientist to study Hong Kong’s dolphins when she arrived in the city, in 1993, to do her PhD on the impact of the construction of the airport at Chek Lap Kok on the animals. She was also involved in helping the WWF get the Chinese white dolphin chosen as the symbol of the city’s handover from Britain to China, in 1997.
“We were stunned that it was chosen as the mascot,” she says. “We thought: ‘Great, what better publicity?’ But it seems that the dolphins have been in and out of the media for so long that people think they’re OK.”
This is not the case.
On June 2, WWF released an emergency action plan to protect the Chinese white dolphin population, identifying seven critical threats to the city’s marine mammals: habitat loss and degradation from development and construction; a depletion of the fish on which they feed because of overfishing, illegal fishing and unsustainable fishing practices; underwater noise disturbance from construction and boat traffic; marine vessels, which can strike and injure or kill the dolphins; toxins and pollutants from industrial and agricultural run-off; entanglement in fishing nets, which can cause cetaceans to drown; and sea level rise, which is expected to cause further loss of habitat.
“Hong Kong is really stressful,” explains Porter. “Can you imagine what it would be like if you lived with somebody jackhammering above you all the time? It would make you incredibly edgy. And the way that manifests in mammals is we get this rush of hormones and endorphins, and when we’re in a highly stressed state the whole time we’re probably burning more energy. But it’s also making it difficult to socialise and to reproduce.”
At the Hong Kong Marine Life Stranding and Education Centre, a large-scale lab cut into the hillside at Ocean Park, in Aberdeen, OPCF’s scientific officer, Mandy Lo Chi-yan, is responsible for conducting a necropsy of each animal carcass that washes up. The most common causes of death are entanglements and boat strikes, but, as WWF’s McCook explains, “If you think of a dolphin that’s not getting enough to eat, it’s perhaps got a heavy toxin load or it’s not well because of pollutants, its likelihood of getting struck is much higher.”
And it is not just Chinese white dolphins that wind up on Lo’s necropsy table. “About 70 per cent of stranding cases are finless porpoises,” she says, referring to Hong Kong’s other, less known, marine mammal population. Last year, 42 finless porpoises died. It’s an alarming number by any measure, made even more so by the fact that no one knows how many are left. The most recent government figures estimate that Hong Kong’s population is just 200.
Not only do finless porpoises exist in the shadow of Chinese white dolphins, the city’s charismatic megafauna, they are also hard to spot. “For years I’ve been trying to get people interested in finless porpoises. And I can understand why people aren’t,” says Porter. “They’re these tiny torpedo-like things, I think they’re pretty cute, but they’re so hard to see that you can’t really get people out there engaged with them.”
Until recently, there wasn’t even footage of them, but thanks to activist and co-founder of marine conservation organisation Oceans Asia, Gary Stokes, there is now. “I set out on a personal challenge, I went to try and photograph these things that people can’t see,” says Stokes. Six months and two drones later, he finally managed to document the animal he likens to a phantom, thanks, in part, to the relatively quiet waters of recent months.
Porter, who works closely with Stokes, believes that reduced marine traffic is having an impact on how Hong Kong’s cetaceans are behaving. She has observed larger groups of finless porpoises much closer to the surface. “It might be premature to say that’s because there are no fast ferries,” she admits. “But that is what the significant difference is in that area – the fast ferries are gone.”
The next step towards understanding the porpoise population is confirming how many there are. “I would normally say the number of dolphin or porpoise in a population isn’t that critical, it’s the pressures we put on them,” says Porter. “But because we are getting so many dead finless porpoise, we do actually need to know whether that’s 1 per cent, 10 per cent or 50 per cent of our population because that’s what’s going to drive government action to try and help them.”
To establish an accurate estimate, Porter hopes to conduct an aerial survey. The only problem is that it will cost “crazy money” to hire a helicopter – HK$1.7 million for 50 hours of flying time. “Where am I going to get HK$1.7 million at a time when the economy is crashing and everyone’s focused, possibly quite rightly so, on human health. It’s a tricky time to be raising funds.”
Yet every activist, conservationist and scientist I speak to agrees: action must be taken now. “We realised that it was time to step up,” says McCook of the emergency action plan, which was put together by a team of experts in management, government agencies, academics and conservationists from Hong Kong and Guangdong province.
It is not the first time such a team has been assembled. “In my career with dolphins it’s the third time we’ve had this major gathering of experts trying to get advice to management authorities,” says Porter. “It feels sometimes that we just aren’t making any progress.”
The difference this time, McCook assures me, is that “we’re playing to win”.
WWF has pinpointed three areas in the Pearl River Delta on which the dolphins depend for feeding, breeding and socialising. These areas need to be carefully managed to mitigate the impact human activity has on marine mammals; underwater noise, construction, illegal fishing, marine traffic and pollution all need to be addressed. According to McCook, the waters around south and west Lantau comprise the most important area for the local Chinese white dolphin population.
Making things more difficult is that cross-border cooperation is necessary, and “that’s not getting any simpler”, admits McCook. “But nonetheless, that’s the objective we have set […] the action plan is very much a cross-boundary process. It has to be.”
“I think that’s a good strategy, to have local engagement and local pressure as well as a more international focus, because then you’re targeting all different levels of government. In my naive world, that’s how it works.”
Being one of the largest populations of Chinese white dolphins left in the world, OPCF’s Lo believes that the Pearl River Delta’s cetaceans “have the best chance of survival”, although that is contingent on taking appropriate action. McCook agrees: “If we can get it right in the Pearl River Delta, particularly for a relatively vulnerable species, then that will provide lessons for the entire world, and it’s not just the Chinese white dolphins that benefit – finless porpoises, fish stocks, biodiversity all stand to gain, too.”
And it is not too late to save Hong Kong’s marine mammals. “Hong Kong’s dolphins are incredibly resilient,” says Porter. “And the last few months have taught the world that wild populations bounce back when you take the human pressure off. I’m convinced that if we do take the pressure off we have every chance of increasing the population again. We’re not at the stage of writing them off just yet.”
