World Dolphin Day: Reporting unusual behavior, threats and increased protections

Nine dolphin species, and several more subspecies and local populations, are currently critically endangered or endangered, according to the most recent assessment by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority. September 12 marks World Dolphin Day, an awareness day created in 2022 by marine conservation nonprofit Sea Shepherd to bring attention to the threats that these highly intelligent mammals face. In late 2025, Lahille’s bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus gephyreus), a subspecies of the common bottlenose dolphin, was reclassified from vulnerable to endangered, with fewer than 400 individuals estimated to remain in the wild. Its main threat, according the IUCN, is being killed as bycatch in gillnet fisheries that operate along the coasts of southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. While threats to species and sub-species remain, efforts are being made to protect and better understand dolphins across the globe, from research uncovering novel behaviors, and increased formal protections, to steps to end cruel confinement practices. For this World Dolphin Day, we present three recent Mongabay stories reporting on dolphins around the world. Illegal drift nets trap dolphins in the Mediterranean despite ban The use of drift nets to catch swordfish is banned in the Mediterranean because the gear often traps dolphins, whales, sharks and turtles. But recent investigations by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) found it was still widely in use in the Alboran Sea between northwestern Morocco and the south coast of Spain, Mongabay’s Victoria Schneider reported in July. “We can see that it is having an impact on precious ecosystems in a unique area, which is the Alboran Sea,” Jesús Urios Culiañez, an ocean policy officer at EJF, told Mongabay. The EU is expected to present fisheries regulators with a proposal for stronger international rules in November 2026. Singapore resort says it will stop breeding and sourcing wild dolphins According to insiders, a resort in Singapore has suspended captive breeding of wild dolphins and stopped sourcing wild dolphins for its oceanarium, contributor Robin Hicks reported for Mongabay in March. As of March, the facility held more than 20 Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus), most descended from animals captured in the Solomon Islands in 2008 and 2009. The company that owns the oceanarium also said it was assembling experts to determine the future of its captive dolphins. Anbarasi Boopal, the former co-chief executive of Singapore’s Animal Concerns Research and Education Society called the move “long overdue progress for animal welfare in Singapore” as long as the decision was motivated by welfare concerns. Dolphins use shells to catch fish in Eastern Australia Bottlenose dolphins off Australia’s east coast have been filmed trapping fish inside empty sea snail shells — a foraging technique previously recorded only in western Australia, thousands of kilometers away, Mongabay’s Bobby Bascomb reported in August. “The second I saw it, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is huge,” said Alexis Levengood, the animal ecologist behind the study into the dolphins. Researchers suspect the behavior developed independently on both coasts. Banner image: A striped dolphin (Stenella coeruleoalba) caught in a French drift net in the North Atlantic. Image © Peter Rowlands/Greenpeace. Credits Topics