An ancient species of dolphin, the Gangetic dolphins, live in the freshwater river systems of India. They are well adapted to this specific ecosystem, with long snouts full of sharp teeth and almost no vision, an ability that would be useless in the muddy river waters. These dolphins have always had a low population and very limited range, being a large mammal restricted to a few river systems on the continent. Today, the dolphins are threatened by human activity in the region including fishing, development, and tourism. Noise pollution from boat engines is especially disorienting to them since they rely on echolocation to navigate. The species is currently listed as endangered, which makes sense given what we learned about small populations being more prone to extinction. Because they depend entirely on the river habitat, conservation efforts for the river dolphins have the potential to be highly targeted and wouldn’t require that much land area to be set aside for conservation. In addition, there’s a lot of support for conservation of the species due to its unique evolutionary history and rarity as a freshwater dolphin species. It is also the national aquatic animal of India and holds cultural importance to people living near it. Unfortunately, despite these factors, conservation efforts have not been able to prevent its population decline, leaving just 6,324 of them in India according to a recent survey. Conservation efforts include strict penalties for hunting the dolphins, since poaching has been a threat to their population. Conservation has had significant conflicts with the local community, since some of the most threatening industries to the species, like fishing and tourism, are also important to the local economies. Many dolphins are accidentally killed by these boats, and these deaths are under reported due to fears of penalties for ‘hunting’ the dolphin. This highlights the importance of what we learned about understanding the community as stakeholders that coexists with an endangered species. While regulations on dolphin poaching should be strict, it doesn’t make sense for them to be applied to people who didn’t mean to kill dolphins, and a better approach might be to regulate how much traffic can pass through these rivers, while keeping in mind how people rely on the rivers to make a living.