AOL News has reported that Kevin Schafer — a 25-year veteran of wildlife photography, who was the first to ever capture the rare Amazonian pink river dolphins on film in 2008 — has returned to snap some more images of the elusive beasts.
The pink, freshwater dolphins are not endangered, but they’re very rarely seen by humans, even though they’ve been sighted in the river systems of Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. Schafer says the photos were taken at a very remote part of the Rio Negro, a tributary to the Amazon River, which is about 50 miles south of Manaus, Brazil.
Amazingly, even though Schafer’s photos represent the first to ever film the river dolphins, they were taken in an area where humans are known to dwell. This would seem to confirm the long held speculation held to be true by many cryptozoologists that fairly large animals can avoid detection even in inhabited areas.
According to Schafer, this fact holds especially true in the murky depths of the Amazon River, where the thick sediment makes the water virtually impenetrable to light:
“There is a lot of sediment in the Amazon. This is an area where the visibility is measured in inches, not feet. That’s why the river dolphins rely on sonar. Their eyes are practically useless under water.”
Schafer also explained how these unique – and evidently violent — freshwater cetaceans obtained the bubble-gum color for which they are now famous:
“The reason they are pink isn’t from the food they eat. They start off gray, but the pink color is from the scar tissue they get fighting other male dolphins. The women are all gray, and the younger males are mostly gray.”
Schafer, whose pictures helped scientists to better understand the elusive dolphins’ behavior, feels that his trips to the Amazon the chronicle these rare creatures represent “the project of a lifetime.”
