#31 | Persistence: The Key to Saving Brazil’s Lahille’s Bottlenose Dolphin with Pedro Fruet, PhD

In this episode, we meet Pedro Fruet, PhD. Surfing off of the coast of Casino Beach in Southern Brazil, Pedro encountered bottlenose dolphins for the first time and fell in love with the species. Casino Beach has a culture focused on ocean conservation, and every summer that his family visited the area, his love for the ocean grew. He later received his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography, and with the help of his colleagues, he determined that the bottlenose dolphins he swam with as a kid was their own subspecies, the Lahille’s Bottlenose Dolphin. Through his studies, Pedro discovered that only 600 individuals currently exist in the population. Now, he’s focusing his attention on the local community to reduce bycatch, the species’ number one threat.

Pedro is a 2021 Whitley Award recipient, which is how I met him. The Whitley Fund for Nature provides support and training to grassroots conservation projects around the world. THE Sir David Attenborough is a WFN trustee, which just shows you how prestigious this organization is. If you have a grassroots conservation project that needs funding, I highly recommend checking out whitleyaward.org and apply for one of their grants.

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