So long, and thanks for all the fish

    Looking across the choppy sea at the front of his research vessel, Hong Kong’s most experienced dolphin counter was carefully optimistic about the future of our marine mammals.

    But that was more than two years ago.

    We were on a day-long survey of pink dolphin territory. The boat methodically traversed a set grid as Dr Samuel Hung and two other spotters from the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society scanned for flipping tail fins, rolling pink backs and breaching beaks. The boat would chug to the edge of the Special Administrative Region, and turn back down the next column carved out for the study. We were in the far eastern edge of the Pearl River Delta, a small slice of pink dolphin territory that lies mostly out of bounds in mainland waters. It was a cold day and the count was low, but still there was optimism.

    Dr Hung told me back then that he was confident of conservation measures in place and the transparent government system that actually enforces regulation on our side of the sea-border. He saw that in contrast to the murky autocracy across the invisible line that separates us from the mainland.

    Now things have changed. Conservation efforts are lagging behind enormous developmental pressures, he tells me. The once trusted environmental assessment system is now a rubber-stamp service for the powerful construction lobby, and “the dolphin habitat will be turned into a war zone unless there are adequate conservation measures,” he says.

    Hong Kong’s western waters are an unlikely setting for dolphin watching. The world’s third busiest international airport is behind you, the belching stacks of Castle Peak coal-fired power station are ahead. The narrow sea channel your eco-tour boat bobs around in is constantly criss-crossed by towering cargo ships, high-speed ferries and rumbling old dredgers. You look down at the water, and a doorframe from a Guangdong village floats by, then a flip flop, and a crumbled fraction of a polystyrene box layered in green marine slime. These are not isolated specs of debris. They form part of a constant, relentless flow, an endless supply of rotting junk and human waste.

AFP

    In that scene a wild mammal appears from nowhere. A muscular pink body breaks the surface for an instant only to disappear in a silent roll. A few seconds later a tale may flip out and splash down, and then we catch a glimpse of an accompanying calf, harder to spot in its grey coat. Tourists strain to capture a satisfying photograph, but mostly they come away with nicely framed shots of the airport fuel depot, a reclamation barge or the Black Point LNG storage tanks that they didn’t even notice were there.

     It is a flash of beauty in a grim setting that only reminds us of the impossible demands humans make on the planet. When a trawler cut through with its net frames cast wide, we saw four or five dolphins leaping in its wake, in the risky business of picking off stray fish. It was almost an idyllic sight, fisher-folk tolerating the harmless opportunism of happy dolphins jumping and diving for scraps. But the reality is far from idyllic, with the pursuit of the fishing-nets being made a necessity for the top marine predators, who scratch out a living in waters severely depleted by the very vessels they follow. Other than presenting the threat of accidental entanglement and drownings in the nets, the fishing-boats are taking food away from future generations of dolphins, they are pushing fish-stocks closer to a total crash.

    The sightings are fleeting, ten seconds here, five there, then a long minute and a half of strained expectation followed by a rewarding breach. These are not the gregarious species that follow tourist boats and put on a show, they are shy silent creatures weirdly existing close to human habitation for thousands of years, mostly unknown to land-dwellers. Hong Kong’s population didn’t get much scientific attention until the1990s. It’s a shame that scientists in the past were not in the habit of talking to fishermen, because had they done so they would have learned that dolphins were so numerous in the waters off Lantau that fishermen used to carry firecrackers on their expeditions to scare them away from casting grounds.

    The extent of their presence in Hong Kong waters only became well-known after British and Chinese policy makers agreed to build a massive airport on reclaimed land in the middle of their territory. In the mid 1990s as the airport rose from the water, it was reckoned that there were about 400 dolphins in west Lantau. What's more, they were irresitably pink and gaining traction amongst a public primed to adore cute pink things. There was no way they could be ignored so they were promoted to mascot status, officially playing a role, in cartoon form at least, at the 1997 handover ceremony when Britain relinquished its colonial outpost to a looming mainland giant. The airport went ahead according to schedule, and dolphin sightings have steadily decreased.

    They are Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins that inhabit warm estuarine zones from South Africa in the west, to Australia’s eastern seaboard. They live in isolated pockets from one river mouth to the next where silted fresh waters of the great rivers mix with the ocean. The Pearl River population, of which we now know the Hong Kong group are a part, were among the first noticed by European taxonomists, so the name Chinese white dolphin has stuck as one of the common names across their habitat.

Credit: Leo Cheung

    All the new-borne calves are grey. They gradually lighten, starting off with pale spots that fade to white. The Pearl river group seem to turn paler than other populations of the species, going so pale that blood flowing under skin causes them to blush pink when they are active. Scientists are not sure why this group turns paler than others, they are not technically albino, but it is possible that the heavily sedimented estuary makes the more common blue-ish grey camouflage an irrelevance. With sharks staying clear of the murky brackish waters the Chinese white dolphins have little reason to hide, taking up a vacancy at the top of the food-chain, except for man. Another suggestion is that with daylight blocked by soupy waters there is no need for dark colours that protect against sunshine, the species have reverted to white, much like the cave dwelling creatures that never see light of day.

    These top predators are equipped to hunt in murky waters with finely tuned echolocation tools, shooting out sonar pulses from their bulbous melon heads. Just like bats they build up a 3D mental map of their environment from rebounding data, with enough clarity to snap up a darting mullet or anchovie from a passing shoal and swallow it whole, head first. Other populations of Indo-Pacific humpbacks have a wider palette than the Pearl river group, taking in squid just like their sperm whale cousins, but here they stick to fish, competing with humans for a dwindling resource.

    Worldwide these coastal dwellers have carved out a once rich niche in estuarine waters, learning to expertly navigate a zone where daily ocean tides clash with seasonal river fluctuations. Hong Kong’s only other cetaceans, the even more elusive finless porpoises, stay clearly out of pink dolphin territory, remaining firmly on the other side of Lantau and scattered eastwards towards clearer sea waters, closer to sharks. Whether the dolphins aggressively defend territory from other sea mammals, or the porpoises simply haven’t fathomed out estuarine living, the dolphins have dominated unchallenged in their patch for thousands of years.

    But that is all history, as they lose out in a competition with humans that has intensified a critical degree in a matter of decades, leaving them with a worldwide conservation status of “near threatened.” Their chosen lifestyle in large river mouths has in fact put these species close to human habitations for centuries. River mouths have long been important to people, for farming, transport, communication, defence, drainage, and of course, fishing. While it is difficult to estimate past dolphin populations, we know with some confidence that the global human population just 200 years ago was a seventh of today’s total. As the Chinese whites are estimated to live to about 40 years, there will be pink dolphins alive today who, like me, were born into a world that had just half the 7 billion human population we have reached. So the whole world has undergone a huge transformation in these decades, but a local look at the Pearl River Delta (PRD) brings home some even more staggering considerations.

    There are an estimated 120 million people living in the PRD, crammed into megacities from Guangzhou to Dongguan, and Shenzhen where 10 million people scratch out a living in a city that didn’t even exist 40 years ago. The seven million in Hong Kong thrive on the eastern side of the delta, in what remains one of the biggest cargo ports in the world. The city funnels billions in foreign investment into massive factories that line the grand river channel, where millions of Chinese workers toil on products that will be snapped up across the world at bargain prices. I know how flip-flops are made in the delta because I’ve seen sheets of foam stamped out with foot shaped cookie-cutters washed up on a beach. From the simplicity of flip-flops to the sophistication of smartphones, we’re getting stuff at bargain prices thanks to the teeming millions toiling in the PRD.

    

On the other side of the estuary once known for murderous pirates, Macau has morphed from a dark backwater into the world’s most profitable gambling destination. Two islands have joined up in a gigantic reclamation hosting monstrous casinos that helped to suck in 45 billion dollars of gambling revenue in 2013. The VIP high-rollers have the choice of five international airports to fly into the delta. These gateways compete against each other to capture the largest number of passengers and the biggest volume of freight, in an estuary that ultimately drains the toilets of up to an eighth of the total population of China, according to an estimate by Hong Kong dolphinwatch society.

This is the world inhabited today by the biggest known population of Chinese white dolphins. That up to 2,500 individuals are still surviving at the mouth of south China’s largest river is surprising when you look at the current situation. But in terms of world history, let alone the slower pace of biological change, the PRD has transformed from a slow-moving agricultural land, to a monster global workshop in the blink of an eye, in just two or three dolphin generations. In fact, for some 150 years before that event, the region experienced depopulation, with the most significant movement of humanity being outwards across the ocean, where Cantonese labourers sought their fortunes abroad.

    The Pearl River dissolves into the South China Sea at eight major outlets, providing a wide stretch of once ideal white dolphin habitat from around 50 km west of Macau, to Hong Kong’s Lantau island. Other populations dotted around the world are much smaller with a few hundred here and there from South Africa, through the Middle East and the Red Sea, around India, the Malacca Straits and Eastern Australia. None of the other populations, including the five or so other colonies in Chinese waters, are bigger than four to five hundred.

    Not only are they the biggest group but they are now also the best known Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, and no one knows them better than Samuel Hung who has spent years counting, photographing, following, and scrutinising them.  “I think Hong Kong right now is the best place to do research on these dolphins. What we learn from this population can be extended to other populations,” said Hung who knows many of the dolphins individually by sight, including adults he first met at the start of his studies more than 10 years ago.

    Hong Kong’s position as a leader in Indo-Pacific humpback research is even more remarkable when we look at the state of knowledge just a couple of years before Hung came to join surveys in west Lantau. Hung, who was born and raised in Hong Kong was a third year biologist in United States when he learned that there were even any dolphins here.

     “I had to play piano at home. I didn’t have much time to go out into the wild. My parents wouldn’t allow me to go hiking or things like that. My only window to see wildlife was through documentaries,” he explained to me. Many years later he was looking for field work opportunities with marine mammals when he was advised to apply in his own home town. His first encounter with dolphins native to his homeland was viewed from thousands of miles abroad, through the Internet. “I saw on the screen these weird looking things and thought, what? Dolphins in Hong Kong and they are pink?”

    He was soon back, as reclamation work for Chep Lap Kok International airport pounded on, decimating the habitat of native dolphins he had just learned about. At that time, few people understood that those seen in Hong Kong waters were part of a much bigger group.  “In the mid-1990s conservation groups told everyone that the dolphins in Hong Kong would be extinct by the year 2000,” he told me on a day-long line survey on a wind-battered junk.

Samuel Hung (left) and HKDCS team member on field work

    Hung went on to help organise large counts in mainland waters, contributing to studies that revealed the world’s biggest white dolphin group. But his regular counts in Hong Kong are strictly limited by the invisible sea-boundary that he cannot freely cross.  His survey in 2007 was the most recent count of dolphins in the delta as a whole, giving an estimate of 2,500 individuals. But now he worries that the numbers are getting out of date. Average daily abundance in Hong Kong waters have dropped by 60 percent in a decade, from 158 in 2003 to 62 in 2013. The WWF estimates a total of 1,800 in 2013 for the PRD in their most recent report.

    The Hong Kong figure is often misquoted as being the dwindling tally for the total number in a distinct local population. What is dwindling is the number of sightings in Hong Kong waters, where there were an average 153 foraging daily this side of the border in 2003. Whether that is indicative of a drop in the overall population, or a preference to forage elsewhere in the delta, Hung doesn’t have the data to make an assessment. He explained to me that the research is still at the stage of understanding how the different clustering “hot-spots” interlock in the whole delta area.

    

HKDWS

In Hong Kong there are three clear hot-spots, a pair of flat islands called "the brothers" in the north, the 12 square kilometer Sha chau and Luk kok chau marine park in the northwest, and off the tip of Tai O village in western Lantau. Right in the middle of this triangle is the airport on a 12 square kilometre artificial island. We don't know the exact function of each hot-spot, but patterns are emerging. Some dolphins tend to be spotted regularly in the same area, others move around more. The Tai O zone is the place where mother and calf pairs are most likely seen. There are usually more dolphins in the morning than in the afternoon, but we don't know exactly where they go after lunch because they head to mainland China and researchers can't follow them across the border.

    It is estimated that the dolphins in the estuary have individual ranges of up to 100 square kilometers. They are constantly on the move in a never ending quest for fish. Patterns are thought to be influenced by changing salinity, currents that vary and temperature fluctuations. They need space and they need freedom of movement. Unlike other species that tend to stick together in clanish pods, killer-whales for example, the Chinese whites, while gregarious, are more individualistic. They'll team up with four or five companions at a time, but they might be seen with a different four on the next sighting. Their very individualism helps to weave together the relationships that hold a single population of 1,800 -- 2,500 spread across the PRD.

    But in Hong Kong waters they are thrown every type of threat that a dolphin can face. For starters we have pretty much fished local waters to death. Catch volumes started declining as early as the 1970s and fishermen have been forced further afield ever since. The government finally agreed to a ban on trawlers at the end of 2012. There are hopes that this will give fish stocks a much needed boost but it will take a long time to rebound to abundance. Regeneration will also be hampered by the loss of thousands of hectares of coastal breeding and nursery grounds, where shores have been dug-up, sealed in concrete and built on.

    The sea itself is being eaten away by rampant development. The airport added one percent to Hong Kong's total land mass and it was by no means a unique reclamation. The city's overlords have treated the sea as somewhere to harvest land from, right from the start of British colonisation. The first major harbour reclamation was in the 1850s when Hong Kong began its creeping advance towards the Kowloon peninsula. Now gigantic engineering feats to bury the harbour are seen as inevitable. At the beginning of 2012 the government inexplicably published a list of 25 marine sites proposed for reclamation. It was a staggering announcement, even by Hong Kong standards, and seemed to come from nowhere. Most worryingly it came with no stated purpose, it was simply a pre-emptive strike on the future.

    Within dolphin territory there are huge plans. The construction for the 50 km bridge and tunnel system to connect Zhuhai, Macau and Hong Kong is well underway. It cuts through Hong Kong’s dolphin hot-spots, and it slices the official Chinese white dolphin national nature reserve, a “sanctuary” designated by the mainland government in 2003. Two man-made islands were created inside the reserve for entry and exit of the tunnel section, so that shipping won’t be disrupted. Dr Hung’s dolphin survey regularly skirts by the island closest to the Hong Kong border. There is little doubt that had the island been planned within Hong Kong waters the construction would have started much later, after a more rigorous environmental impact assessment than is required in the mainland.  

    The biggest worry for the dolphins has been the piling work during construction. “Dolphins are acoustically sensitive,” Hung told me. “Whenever you have construction like piling, studies show it affects their ability to echolocate to find food and also to communicate,” he said. The most critical work is taking place up to 2016 when the bridge is scheduled to open. The cost of the whole project was estimated at over 10 billion US in 2009 when construction began on the mainland side, before the environmental impact assessment had been completed in Hong Kong. After about two years of construction, Hung and the WWF have shown that the dolphins as predicted have stayed away from the immediate surroundings.

    Another gigantic project will be the land reclamation and construction for the airport’s third runway, now being promoted by Hong Kong’s airport authority. They say that this 17 billion dollar project is essential to keep up with demand, and the city will see more than 100 billion dollars in benefit within 50 years.  It would add an additional 6.5 square kilometres to the airport, bringing the end of the runway to within a kilometre of a marine park that was offset in the 1990s as a reserve for dolphins. “It will have a huge impact on the dynamics of the dolphins in Hong Kong. It has the effect of further shrinking their range within Hong Kong waters,” Hung told me.

    Another problem is the debris and water pollution. Numerous photographs of the pink dolphins show gashes and deep cuts from net entanglements and other mishaps. Sometimes a dolphin will snag a rope on its fin, unable to get free of it for months, even years. If it doesn’t kill them it can scar for life. One individual was named Ringo by dolphin watchers because of a deep groove that cut into her neck from a noose she was lucky not to have been killed by.

    The floating jetsom is bad enough, but the invisible substances working through the food chain may prove to be more lethal. Dead specimens have been found contaminated with heavy metals such as mercury and cadium, pesticides like DDT, and flame-retardants that are used in everything from mobile phones to household furniture. Dolphins eat the fish that feed and grow in water contaminated by leaking landfills, hosed-down factory floors and direct dumping. The contaminants build up in their body-tissue, they become useful to us as bio-indicators of pollution levels. Studies of other cetaceans have shown that these poisons can affect immune systems and reproduction. “So it’s not going to be quick death, it’s going to be slow. It’s going to be difficult to see the consequences,” said Hung.

    So they are losing food, they are losing habitat, they are getting battered by noise and debris, and they are being poisoned. Can it possibly get any worse? Well yes, on top of that they are scraping by in the maritime equivalent of a motorway. At peak times a high-speed ferry zooms through dolphin habitat every three minutes, and throughout the day heavy barges, fuel tankers and laden cargo ships groan through water channels to the north and south of Lantau island. Washed up carcasses have shown evidence of collisions, while the ones that dodge the mountainous tonnage of shifting metal are hemmed into ever narrower lanes. The constant cluttering sounds from throbbing engines are likely to interfere with echolocation and communication. When conservationists say that noisy boats stress dolphins out it is tempting dismiss that as sentimental clap-trap, how can we tell if a dolphin is stressed out? But a recent study of North Atlantic Right Whales on the US coast may have finally found tangible evidence for this. They measured stress hormones in whale dung over a period of time, and discovered a noticeable drop in September 2001, days after the terrorist attacks that terrified Americans out of travel and triggered a historic lull in sea-traffic.

    The obvious question then is how Hong Kong’s pink dolphins can possibly survive?

    “It is a remarkable fact that, despite being afforded all this protection, the dolphin will probably become locally extinct and that Hong Kong and China cannot, together, protect it.” So read an editorial in a marine biology journal published by Hong Kong university press in 1995. nearly 20 years on they are still here, but the numbers are dropping, as AFCD, Dr Hung, Hong Kong’s dolphin watch eco-tourism group, and WWF all concur.

    To a population biologist like Hung, there isn’t enough data to predict anything with certainty. “We don’t know what are the chances of survival,” he said to me back in 2012 when the daily abundance estimate was still over 70. Now with that rate dropping to 62 in 2013 Hung acknowledges that the outlook has become bleaker, “I am increasingly more pessimistic now with the negative impact of the bridge works, as well as the discussion of the third runway,” he says.

    China already lost one unique cetacean species this decade. The baiji river dolphin was probably last seen in the Yangze sometime in 2002. The agonisingly slow demise of the species was a trauma that reverberated around the world. It wasn’t for lack of trying to save it that it slipped away. The authorities started protection efforts for the species as early as the 1970s. Sanctuaries were designated and captive individuals were implored to breed. International experts were called in, saving the baiji became a cause celebre.

Baiji skull

    British author Douglas Adams went in search of the last baiji in the mid-1980s and documented his experiences for the BBC and in his book “Last Chance to See”. The fourth book in his science-fiction trilogy “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was named “So Long and thanks for all the fish,” which was the final message that dolphins in the book left for mankind before they left the planet, knowing that Earth would be demolished to make way for a new inter-galactic highway.

     Throughout the period that conservationists were trying to save the baiji there was an unstoppable force bearing down on them – the massive destruction and commercial exploitation of its habitat. Most of all, there was nothing the authorities could do to stop poor people desperately trying to keep up with the rising cost of living by casting nets across the river to scrape an income from dwindling fish stocks.

     The effort to save the species generated a lot of well-intentioned hot air. “A renewed international initiative to generate momentum and increased international support for a carefully managed semi-natural recovery programme at Tian ‘e-Zhou from 2004 onwards, involving development of a detailed budget and implementation plan and extensive fund-raising efforts, was unsuccessful because the species had already disappeared,” concludes an IUCN report. In other words we gave it our best shot -- programmes, plans and a lot of words -- but the dolphin was already dead.

    There is an important difference between the pink dolphins and the baiji, which could be good news for the pearl river populations, but bad news for Hong Kong. In the case of the baiji there was only one possible habitat, the Yangze river it had adapted to over 20 million years, evolving away from its marine ancestry. Effectively for the baiji it was a sealed environment, which was then strangled of life in a few decades as riverbank populations of humans exploded. There was nowhere else the baiji could go. The pink dolphins on the other hand have much larger leeway in the PRD. Hong Kong is merely a visiting point at the eastern extremity of its vast habitat. In the wider context it isn’t that important whether pink dolphins stick around inside the formal boundary of the Special Administrative Region. Or is it?

    It probably wouldn’t be important if the other side of that boundary was a place with good environmental laws, transparent public institutions, freedom of information, academic independence and accountable government. Unfortunately it is China.

    That may seem like a strange thing to say. What do dolphins care if there is a free press, or if people trust their mayor? They probably don’t. But like it or not their fate lies in the hands of human institutions now. We have altered their habitat to such an extent that ultimately their only hope of survival, despite their free rein for millennia past, is that they are fully taken into account in the human management plan.

    Sure, if the dolphins are squeezed away from Hong Kong waters there is a good chance that they will survive for several years in the delta, decades even. But we’ll lose valuable data and we can say with certainty that their outlook will be bleak across the border. The developmental pressures that are in Hong Kong are also present across the region. Landfills, reclamations, sea-traffic, pollution and overfishing are all familiar problems elsewhere in the estuary. What they don’t have across the border are forums to openly discuss those problems, and strong legal tools to leverage decision makers.

    “In Hong Kong at least it is kind of in our control. We can implement effective conservation measures to ensure that at least this part of the range is properly protected. We have a transparent system, we have a government that actually enforces regulations,” Hung said back in 2011.

    He was right of course. “One country, two systems,” is a political slogan but it does mean something for now. Dolphins wouldn’t notice the difference. For them the estuary is probably a single system dotted with many different spots worth visiting for particular rewards. But for humans taking part in conservation efforts, there is a difference.

    On one side of the border an environmental activist can email a request for data to the AFCD on the latest dolphin studies. That person will normally receive some useful information such as a link to a relevant report. He can then cross reference this with a WWF report, or one from a similar NGO of repute, and make a reasonable assessment of the latest available information. He can then use that information to campaign publicly for changes. That side is called Hong Kong. On the other side however you never know where you can find reliable data, or if anyone will openly discuss development plans, or possibly whether you’ll even get into trouble for trying. That side is called mainland China.

PRD denim factory 2010 CNN

      But nothing lasts for ever and there are worrying signs that genuine independence and autonomy are being eroded in Hong Kong. “We used to believe that our EIA system would work to help dolphins, but it has failed us during the construction of the bridge, and may fail us once again in the disussion of the third runway,” Hung tells me now.

     

Told to CNN 2010

China’s mantra of course is that everything achieved over the last 60 years has added up to economic development. All the sacrifices, including the environment, wildlife, community and even freedom, have been for the sake of the ultimate empowerment – to lift people out of poverty.  It is a compelling story that has its equivalent all over the world, from the protestant work ethic to the Samurai code of loyalty and self-denial. It has its uses, but sometimes there is need to redress an imbalance. A look at our degraded environment should jolt people into seeing that something has gone wildly askew. Just as the air we breath in the PRD is thick with lung damaging particles, so the ocean is swamped with trash. We should save the dolphins because the environment we would create in doing so, is the kind of environment that the rich have always sought for themselves and their offspring.

    People, like myself, who find animals fascinating and inherently valuable, are usually absolutely rubbish at explaining why anyone else should care about the environment. At best we assume it is self-evident, and leave it at that, but far too often we resort to weak subjective appeals towards the strength of our passions. Forget that gibbering rubbish. Animals are bio-monitors. If they are in trouble, so are you, and more so, your children and your grandchildren. They are bio-monitors individually, in cells under their skin, in their respiration and reproduction. And they are bio-monitors as population groups, in their decline or rise, and well-being.

    People have the opportunity to struggle and accumulate wealth in this territory but people don’t seem to have time to question what they really want to do with that wealth. A classic dream is to buy property and get richer…But then what? I wander what the super rich prefer to do? Watch a gigantic TV screen all day locked inside an air-conditioned mansion? Or get on a plane and go somewhere nice? Somewhere with good food, a bit of greenery and fresh air, clean waters and...dolphins, perhaps. I think it’s clear, the rich and wealthy are voting with their feet – they head off to lovely places like New Zealand and Canada at every opportunity.

Let's face it, the rich have always sought a pristine environment

    I would love to do a survey of decision makers in this city, of the people who use their powers, whether that be economic, legislative or informal, to push through mega-construction projects such as land reclamations and monstrous bridges. How many of them take regular trips out of Hong Kong? How many of them flock to destinations where the environment is clean and wildlife thriving nearby? How many of them already have homes in those places? May be even live there most of the time or keep their families there? It would be an interesting survey.

    Look across the border. A recent report found half of China’s millionaires admitting to making plans to leave the mainland within the next five years. Why fix your own neighbourhood if you’re just going to move on after making a pile of cash?

    In Hong Kong it’s not just the rich. Hard working people who struggle to meet their monthly payments put aside meagre surpluses for 5-day bargain tours each year, anywhere except home, anywhere where they can snatch a breath of clean air. Hairdressers, chefs and construction workers labour for years, long days, 6-day weeks, making heroic sacrifices so that their children will get an opportunity to study abroad.

     What if, instead of this regular and constant turnover of people wanting to get away at every opportunity, we build this territory into the kind of place where you would encourage your children to go swimming in the ocean every evening after school? The kind of place where pink dolphins thrive.

    It’s a nice idea, but is it realistic? More realistic than all of us becoming millionaires, that’s for sure. People like Samuel Hung who have committed their working life to bettering the environment have a remarkable resilience. He told me two years ago that a decade of dolphin surveys had made him more optimistic about the possibility of saving them, not the other way round.

    “When you see the up and coming generation you see the hope that more people will be aware of environmental issues and they’ll have a better sense of belonging,” he said.  

     It may not be too late. Hung thinks that if the dolphins can survive the construction period of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, the structure itself won’t necessarily be harmful, although the scheduled immigration island will take more territory away from dolphins. The best-case scenario is that the bridge reduces demand for ferries and the Macau sea-traffic lets up. The third runway for the airport looks unstoppable at the moment and despite ridiculous mitigation plans, such as designating a marine park adjacent to the new runway in 2023 when it might all be too late, there are hopes that the effects of the 2012 trawling ban will soon begin to yield results. There are some signs that the dolphins are finding their own solution anyway by going further around the corner at Tai O on the tip of Lantau and spending more time in the Fan Lau area and the Soko Islands. After all dolphins do have a reputation for being intelligent, so let’s hope they’ve got some of their best minds working on the problem.

    The government will not want a second baiji on its hands, and to be fair current numbers of the pink dolphins are higher than those of the Yangze dolphin when their survival first became a concern. Political will might still have time to catch up with conservationist wisdom, even sit down and listen to the protagonists and take some of their suggestions.

    Those include committed battlers like Hung, Hong Kong Dolphinwatch, members of WWF, and hard working individuals in the government’s AFCD, as well as the environment protection department. There is a growing body of people learning and teaching about the extraordinary and unique ecology of Hong Kong. Above all there are 1,800 to 2,500 dolphins somewhere in the PRD, somehow ducking and diving between the catamarans and dredgers. And in the human population there is a growing thirst for quality of life, real quality, not just flat-screens. More people are stopping to ask the big questions such as – what is it all for anyway?

Hong Kong: scrubs up well, sometimes