PINK DOLPHINS EXIST IN THE REAL WORLD Captain Erik Rue happened to be in charge of a chartered fishing boat on June 24th on the Calcasieu Lake in southwestern Louisiana when he spotted five bottleneck dolphins swimming alongside his boat about ten feet from where he was standing.
One of the five dolphins was extremely pink in skin color. After taking a few pictures of this rare dolphin, he wrote the following description of his experience in his own website:”It appears to be a freak of nature, an albino dolphin with glossy pink skin and reddish eyes.”
Pink dolphins have been spotted in such isolated areas as the Amazon river, but not in North America. In fact, the Amazon pink dolphins are in danger of being “functionally extinct” because the Brazilian government are building a hydro-electric dam in the middle of the pink dolphins native habitat.
HYDRO- ELECTRIC DAMS AND DOLPHINS DON’T MIX Hydro-electric dams tend to isolate groups of dolphins that are in the vicinity of these huge underwater machines and they lead to the creation of two smaller populations. Since that reduces the total number of dolphins, the breeding potential is much less like to take place. Also hunters seem to love the pink flesh of the dolphins as they continually use the pink skin as bait to catch other, bigger fish.
Every year, numerous dead and mutilated pink dolphin carcasses are found all over the Amazon river area, sometimes with the hunter’s initials carved in the fin area of the dead dolphin. This trend towards killing the pink dolphins for sport has led to a decrease in the pink dolphin population by 10 percent each year, which will lead to total extinction unless some strict hunter laws are put in place by the Brazilian government very soon.
HISTORY OF THE PINK DOLPHIN Henri de Blainville first described the pink dolphin in 1817 upon viewing one on a trip to the Amazon. He noticed that some of these dolphins start out by being a shade of Grey when they are first born, and then gradually turn pink in color as they mature.
On rare occasions, a pink dolphin can be seen swimming with more than ten or twelve of his similarly colored kinfolk, but most of the time he will swim with the normal skin-colored dolphins in fresh water rivers.
It has been speculated on the part of marine biologists that the pink dolphin gets his pink color with age because its skin gets more translucent in nature, which allows the blood to show through its skin much more prominently. When these dolphins get really excited, they tend to turn a bright pink color, just like a human does when he or she is embarrassed about something.
NO OTHER NORTH AMERICAN PINK DOLPHIN SIGHTING ON RECORD This is the first occurrence of a sighting of a pink dolphin swimming in a North American lake on record, so this occurrence will not be happening again anytime soon. Even in places where these dolphins do swim regularly, it is still a rare sight to have one swim so close to a ship or a boat.
The witnesses to this sighting are lucky indeed to have seen such a magnificent sight as this rare and Disney-esque dolphin happily swimming with his protective dolphin family in that Louisiana lake.
