Cape Talk, Thursday night

You should move to the United States because here there is no dolphins. But when I explained, Custovo said that yes, there are dolphins in the Amazon, they started to say, oh, it would be very complicated to move to the Amazon, very dangerous. Since then, he's dedicated his life to studying and protecting these elusive creatures and their habitats. He's even put his life on the line in the name of conservation. In the early 2000s, fishermen in Brazil were hunting as many.

As 1,000 dolphins per year. They were used as bait for a species of catfish called the piracinga. Fernando presented studies to the Colombian government showing the fish was unsafe for human consumption as it had toxic levels of mercury. And the Colombian government banned the trade. Two people wanted to kill me, so I was coming here with a bulletproof jacket and with a bodyguard for some months, but then I had the chance to.

With the people that believed I was doing something bad for their economy, and they understood. They understood that I was trying to protect people. When Fernando first arrived in Puerto Nariño, no one knew how many river dolphins there were. He founded the Omacha Foundation in the 1990s, and since then, he and colleagues have documented five species of dolphin in the Amazon. They counted abundance and distribution. And when we

Did the analysis about the populations, we found a very sad news. The pink dolphins have decreased by 52% and the grey dolphin 37%. So it's a huge reduction in 30 years. As the number of people living in the Amazon basin has increased, so have the pressures on river dolphins. Today they share their rivers with close to 50 million people. Pollution has reached harmful levels, made worse by mercury from illegal.