Members of the IWC Task Team for Lahille’s bottlenose dolphins are meeting in Brazil in March.

The Task Team concept was launched in 2015 to provide rapid responses to dramatic declines in dolphin or porpoise populations.  Task Teams aim to be closely targeted and agile. Their first focus is local expertise, combining this with government and regional authority engagement and incorporating international specialists as needed.

Lahille’s is a sub-species of the bottlenose dolphin and only two small populations of Lahille's exist today.  These two populations are spread between Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay and there is evidence of sharp decline in several parts of this range.

The Lahille’s Task Team was established in 2021. It’s objectives include:

• monitoring throughout the range to increase understanding across several topics such as their abundance, prevalence of disease and rates of mortality, growth and maturity.
• implementation of a health assessment programme.
• work with fishing communities and relevant authorities to reduce bycatch.

The workshop will assess progress against all the agreed objectives and also plan the next steps in developing a Conservation Management Plan (CMP) for Lahille’s dolphin.  Task Teams may hand over to the more formal, long-term framework of a CMP once the most urgent Task Team objectives are achieved or underway. A precedent for this is the franciscana, another dolphin species which was the focus of IWC’s first Task Team in 2015 and endorsed as a CMP the following year.

Franciscana and Lahille’s dolphins share the same range and therefore face many of the same threats.  At the March workshop, the Lahille’s Task Team will also seek to identify synergies between these two programmes, ensuring knowledge is shared and informs the development of a new CMP.

The Lahille’s Task Team workshop takes place 7-8 March in Rio Grande, Brazil.

Read more about Task Teams

Read more about CMPs including the franciscana CMP