NOT ALL DOLPHINS LIVE IN THE OCEAN

While majority of dolphins live in ocean habitats -saltwater -- there are a number of river dolphins that call inland rivers their home. These include the boto, or Amazon river dolphin, whom the native Amazonians consider as magical beings who take on human form and hide their blowholes under a hat, according to National Geographic.

There are also river dolphins in the Araguaia, Ganges, and Irrawaddy rivers. The Irrawaddy dolphin is down to 92 individuals in the Mekong river, as counted by the World Wildlife Fund. This decline is blamed on several factors, such as unrestricted hunting. The explosives used during the Vietnam War also caused audio trauma to their echolocation systems. More recently, the hydropower dam projects in the Irrawaddy and Mekong rivers disrupt the large fish migrations along the Mekong -- the river dolphins’ food source.

It’s likely that the Irrawaddy river dolphin may go the way of the Chinese river dolphin or baiji, who have possibly been extinct since 2006, as reported by Nathan Thompson in a 2018 Al Jazeera article.