2021/09/07 by Gill Braulik, Gill T. Braulik, Randall R. Reeves +1
Environmental Science · #Ichthyology and Marine Biology #Marine animal studies overview #Mercury impact and mitigation studies
paper · doi:10.1002/aqc.3715
openalex publication_date 2021/09/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Taxonomic uncertainty continues to be an impediment to efficient conservation, even for large and charismatic animals such as whales and dolphins. This is exemplified by several discoveries in the last few months alone: a new species of great whale was described in the Gulf of Mexico (Rosel et al., 2021); there was the discovery of a beaked whale that is likely to be an undescribed species from the coast of Mexico (https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/whale-of-a-find-scientists-spot-beaked-whale-believed-to-be-a-new-species); and, most recently, the South Asian river dolphin species (Platanista gangetica), was split into two separate and highly endangered species, the Indus and Ganges river dolphins (Platanista minor, and Platanista gangetica, respectively) (Braulik et al., 2021). These cases reveal not only how much we still have to learn about whales and dolphins but how difficult it is to gather enough information to able to understand and scientifically describe them, even for dolphin species found in rivers, with comparatively limited distributions, and living amongst millions of humans. The river dolphin study, for example, took 20 years to complete, years that also saw the ranges of both species decline substantially.