Fishermen have spotted a pod of more than 500 dolphins in West Bay in Balochistan’s coastal city of Gwadar, a sighting that marine life expert Muhammad Moazzam Khan described as an encouraging sign for the area’s marine ecosystem.
Fishing boat captain Ameer Dad Khan said he saw the dolphins swimming together and leaping out of the water near his vessel.
Muhammad Moazzam Khan, a technical adviser to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), identified them as Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, scientifically known as Tursiops aduncus.
The species inhabits the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, including Balochistan’s coastal waters.
He described the large pod’s presence in Gwadar’s shallow waters as “a promising sign of a robust coastal ecosystem along Balochistan’s shores”, particularly in Gwadar.
Khan said the sighting was an encouraging indicator of biodiversity and a healthy food chain in both coastal and offshore waters.
He added that WWF had documented 26 species of cetaceans in waters off the Balochistan and Sindh coasts. These marine mammals include coastal and deep-sea dolphins, as well as toothed and baleen whales.