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The life of Fernando Trujillo (Bogotá, 56 years old) can be told through his encounters with river dolphins. At the age of 5 or 6, when he entered the rivers of Puerto Carreño, in the Colombian Orinoco, a place that his grandfather frequented to do business, he heard people warn that the “toninas” were coming, that he had to immediately get out of the river. water. “I never saw them and I even thought it was a dangerous animal,” he recalls now sitting in the office of Omacha, an organization he directs and founded in 1993. “Many years later, as a marine biology student at the University Jorge Tadeo Lozano, was that I knew that they were pink dolphins, which is what they call them in that area of Colombia.”
Around that time, in 1886, he saw one – or rather two – for the first time. “Colombian cardiologist Jorge Reynolds and Francisco Navia, then director of the Rodadero Aquarium, had brought two live river dolphins from the Amazon to Bogotá, and I went to the Red Cross to see them in a pool where they were ”. Years before, also as a student, the iconic oceanographer Jacques Cousteau had given him the hint that “no one was studying the dolphins of the Amazon,” during a talk he gave at the University. And in 1887, called by simple curiosity, he managed to observe them in the river: jumping freely above the water.
“In July of that year I got on a cargo plane with two companions that took us to Leticia. [capital del Amazonas], which was an area of heavy drug trafficking.” After ten hours by boat, they arrived at Puerto Nariño and there a scene happened that, even today, seems to be playing out in their minds. “It was early, we were all silent in a canoe along a canal. Without breathing. And, suddenly, three gray dolphins [Sotalia fluviatis] They jump, get lost in the mist and return to the water. It was incredible”. His decision was simple: life had led him to study river dolphins.
On that occasion he stayed two months in the Amazon. Then, she would visit the region every time she had vacations. Over time, she was out there more than anywhere else, watching dolphins.
But these animals also became an excuse. “Although I started with a very romantic approach to conserving them, because yes, they are beautiful and must be protected, I understood that to achieve this the entire ecosystem had to be conserved, including other animals.” Over time, Trujillo and Omacha began to work with caimans, turtles, and manatees, and not only in the waters of the Amazon, but also the Orinoco and the Caribbean. The sum of all this work and having been the leader of one of the seven research projects that were part of Rolex and National Geographic Perpetual Planet Amazon Expedition led him to be chosen as Explorer of the Year by NatGeo, an award that was born in 2011 and that, for the first time, has been obtained by a Latin American.
As he himself says, it is a tribute that has “big shoes to fill.” Some of the other people who have received it are James Cameron, filmmaker, explorer and director of the movie Titanic, and the park rangers of Virunga, the oldest natural national park in Africa, a mountain gorilla sanctuary, but also one of the places most dangerous to protect in the world. In just two decades, more than 170 defenders have been murdered there.
Dolphins coming out of the river
Trujillo seems to have its own founding myth. When he was canoeing in Puerto Nariño, the indigenous people passed by and greeted him, but they did not call him by his name. They called him Omacha. “I didn’t understand, because at first the indigenous people enjoyed me a lot, they laughed at me because I was a city dweller, a university student who didn’t know many things,” he says. “When I asked them why that nickname, the answer was beautiful.” Omacha means pink dolphin in Tikuna, an indigenous group that lives between the Amazon of Colombia, Brazil and Peru. “We believe that you are a pink dolphin who became people to protect his brothers,” was what they told him.
It is not the only occasion in which indigenous cosmology anthropomorphizes pink dolphins [Inia geoffrensis]. It is common for the pink dolphin, the Tikunas also say, to become a man and, when he does, he puts on a stingray as a hat and a snake as a belt. In Omacha, the NGO, there are crafts that portray this. “Dolphins are highly respected in indigenous cosmology, which says they have submerged cities. But they are also wonderful creatures, especially in how they have adapted extraordinarily well to the Amazon.”
The pink dolphins, which have been in these basins for two million years, freed their vertebrae to be able to move them laterally and thus be able to swim through the flooded forests, between the branches and roots of the trees, in search of fish. This is something that neither sea dolphins nor gray river dolphins, which have only been in the Amazon for 500,000 years, can do. “They still have some marine behaviors,” says Trujillo.
But as has happened with many species, both river dolphins are at risk. After collecting data and observations for 30 years, Omacha identified that in the Colombian Amazon trapeze their populations are plummeting: “We have lost 52% of the pink dolphins and 37% of the gray ones.” This is right where the NGO works. That is, a monitored area, with fishing agreements and conservation initiatives, which is why the expert deeply believes “that the situation is worse in other areas.”
In 2018, through trial and error, the indigenous and Omacha communities created the Tarapoto Lakes Agreements, which limit the amount of fishing per person, veto certain fishing gear and set minimum sizes, among other things. This is a model that has been copied by several organizations and recognized by the FAO. But getting there was not easy. “The first attempt was in 1992, but we were wrong, and it mu
st be said. The authorities and the NGOs came to say what the points were, to impose what had to be done, so it didn’t work.” The current agreement, on the other hand, was discussed for four years and was born from the same communities that live in Puerto Carreño. Once they created it, it was made official as such before the fishing authorities.
And for Trujillo, the dolphins have been the excuse. Thanks to them, his organization has traveled 80,000 kilometers of rivers and has carried out more than 70 expeditions. The dolphins have opened the doors of the Amazon, the Orinoco and the Caribbean; They have taken him to work in Brazil and Peru and have allowed him to understand the complexity of the problems of that region which, for him, more than the lung of the world, is its heart. A heart that could have a heart attack.
In Omacha’s office in Bogotá there are boxes and packages everywhere. And no, they are not moving. Trujillo says that they are in the process of restoring and improving the Puerto Nariño headquarters. He built that place after trying to rehabilitate a river dolphin for the first time, because, again, his life can be told through these animals. “Some fishermen called me and said that two dolphins had fallen into his net. A mother and her baby, but the mother was dead.” When Trujillo arrived to see what had happened, the calf was tied with a rope from a tree, injured. “I didn’t know what else to do and I took her to a pool on a farm belonging to a man who had been murdered.” The pool was cloudy, more like a pond, but he got in with the baby, left it there and went to sleep.
“At four in the morning he gave me something. She couldn’t sleep. “I went to the pool and then I found out that the children, as a game, used to put river piranhas in that pool, so I took the dolphin out.” Despite being released later, near another dolphin that had a calf, with the intention of adopting it, he died a few days later. “That was my warning that you couldn’t work like that and what prompted me to build a headquarters in Puerto Nariño, where I could rehabilitate animals.” As to how many dolphins he has seen in his life, Trujillo may have already lost count.
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