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10 Marine Animals Disappearing From Indian Waters, and What Is Actually Taking Them

10 Marine Animals Disappearing From Indian Waters, and What Is Actually Taking Them

Author: Rohit Gupta

Published:

Seahorse clinging to seagrass underwater | Indian waters | Ocean Evoke India

Seahorses have been illegal to catch or trade in India since 2001. They sit in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, which the government describes as “the highest degree of protection” available under Indian law.

Research published in 2021 estimated that 13 million seahorses were being caught in Indian waters every year between 2015 and 2017. Eighty-nine percent of them came up in trawls and seine nets, which is to say almost nobody was looking for them.

That gap between the law and the water is the real subject here. Below are ten marine animals declining in Indian waters, and for each one, the specific thing taking it. Some are hunted. Most are not.

One boundary first. Everything on this list lives in the sea, which is why the Ganges river dolphin is absent despite being the animal Indians search for most in this space. It is a freshwater species and belongs to a different article. The conservation status labels used below come from two different systems, one scientific and one legal, and if you want to know how to read them, that is the subject of a separate piece on endangered marine animals of India.

1. The dugong

The dugong is a seagrass-grazing marine mammal of shallow coastal water, and it is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. That is a global category, and no separate assessment of India’s population was found for this article.

Indian law goes further than the global category might suggest. The dugong sits in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, and in September 2022 India notified its first Dugong Conservation Reserve, about 448 square kilometres of northern Palk Bay.

What is taking it: not hunting. Dugongs graze on seagrass, and the reserve was declared for the dugongs and the seagrass-associated species they depend on, which tells you where the vulnerability sits. When a meadow goes, the animals that feed on it go too. The other pressure is entanglement in fishing gear set for other species.

There is better news here than anywhere else on this list. The Wildlife Institute of India, working with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department, carried out the country’s first systematic drone-based dugong survey and estimated 270 animals along the Tamil Nadu coast, 158 in Palk Bay and 112 in the Gulf of Mannar. It recorded mother-and-calf pairs, which means the population is breeding rather than simply persisting. Read it carefully, though. That is two bays, not a country, and one estimate rather than a trend.

2. The whale shark

The whale shark is a very large filter-feeding shark, and it has the clearest before-and-after story on this list.

In July 2016 the IUCN moved it from Vulnerable to Endangered, reporting that global numbers had more than halved over roughly the preceding 75 years. Fisheries catches, entanglement in nets and vessel strikes are among the pressures named. Those figures are global, and no India-specific trend was available for this article.

What is taking it: in India, the mechanism changed. Whale sharks were hunted off the Gujarat coast for export until 2001, when the species became the first fish ever included in the schedules of the Wild Life (Protection) Act. Before that amendment the Act, already nearly three decades old, protected no fish at all. What remains is entanglement and being struck by vessels.

3. The olive ridley turtle

The olive ridley is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, according to NOAA Fisheries, and it does something almost no other animal does. In an arribada, synchronised mass nesting, large numbers of females come ashore together over a few nights to lay. India has three recorded arribada sites and all three are in Odisha: Gahirmatha, the Devi river mouth and Rushikulya.

What is taking it: capture in fishing gear in the waters off those beaches. This is worth separating from the story most people know, which is about eggs being taken or trampled on the sand. The pressure that matters here reaches the adults before they ever arrive.

4. The Indian Ocean humpback dolphin

A coastal dolphin whose range runs from the southern tip of Africa to the southern tip of India. It reaches India’s southern and western coastal waters and is not a nationwide species.

The IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Cetacean Specialist Group listed it as Endangered as at November 2024, pointing to the animals’ proximity to heavily populated coastlines along with shipping and its associated infrastructure. In early 2024 researchers formed a conservation network of 72 scientists from 17 countries, the first coordinated effort across the whole range.

What is taking it: Whale and Dolphin Conservation names incidental mortality in fishing gear as primarily responsible, with habitat loss and degradation contributing. A coastal dolphin lives exactly where the nets are.

5. The Irrawaddy dolphin

Endangered on the IUCN Red List and listed in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act. Its Indian stronghold is Chilika in Odisha, a brackish lagoon connected to the sea rather than open ocean, and it holds the largest concentration of the species anywhere.

Odisha’s census of 20 January 2026 counted 765 dolphins of six species along the state’s coast, including 208 Irrawaddy dolphins, of which 159 were in Chilika. That is the same figure as 2025. Stable is not the same as recovering.

What is taking it: the pressures named are prawn enclosures, nylon fishing nets, and roughly 250 private boats operating in the lagoon.

6. Sawfishes

Every sawfish species is now assessed by the IUCN as either Endangered or Critically Endangered, all are on Appendix I of CITES, the international trade convention’s strictest tier, and all have been protected under India’s Wild Life (Protection) Act since 2001.

What is taking it: fishing. The Sawfish Conservation Society names it as the main threat, with habitat loss secondary, and the conservation bodies working on the group attribute the losses to capture in fisheries rather than to any targeted hunt for the animals themselves.

One distinction is routinely lost here. CITES Appendix I bars commercial international trade. It has nothing to say about what happens in a net inside Indian waters.

7. Wedgefishes and guitarfishes

Shark-shaped rays, sometimes called rhino rays, and probably the animals on this list you are least likely to have heard of. They are also the most threatened marine fish group in the world: of the 16 warm-water species, all but one are assessed as Critically Endangered.

What is taking them: overfishing for meat and fins. They are caught in much of the world’s warm coastal water, including along the Indian coast.

8. Seahorses

The animal this article opened with, and the clearest evidence on it.

Seahorses went into Schedule I in 2001, banning capture and trade outright. Research by Tanvi Vaidyanathan at the University of British Columbia, published in Biodiversity and Conservation and reported by Mongabay India, estimated 13 million seahorses caught annually in Indian waters between 2015 and 2017, the most recent estimate located for this article. Eighty-nine percent were taken by non-selective gear such as trawls and seine nets.

What is taking them: not poachers. Trawls. A ban on catching seahorses does very little when the seahorses are coming up inside a net set for prawns, and independent reporting has documented that the ban has not ended extraction for exactly this reason.

It remains the single most useful number here, because it shows how large a catch can be when nobody is trying.

9. Sea cucumbers

Sea cucumbers are the exception that makes the pattern visible.

In 2001 the Government of India imposed a blanket ban, listing every holothurian species under Schedule I and ending the fishery and trade outright. Not the threatened ones. Every species in Indian waters, whatever its individual risk. ICAR-CMFRI, the national marine fisheries research institute, describes it in exactly those terms.

What is taking them: deliberate, targeted, illegal harvest. This is the one entry on the list where the animals are being sought, and the ban has still not ended the trade, because a prohibition is only as strong as the enforcement behind it across thousands of kilometres of coast.

10. Corals

Corals are animals. Not plants, not rocks. They were brought under India’s Wild Life (Protection) Act in the same 2001 amendment that covered the whale shark, alongside a range of sharks, rays and molluscs.

What is taking them: the question is really about everything above. Reef is the habitat that several of these animals feed and shelter in, so the condition of India’s coral reefs sets the ceiling on how well the rest of the list can do. An animal cannot be protected out of the place it lives in.

What is actually taking them

Read the ten entries together and one mechanism keeps reappearing. Seahorses in trawls. Humpback dolphins in gear set for fish. Sawfishes taken in fisheries that were not looking for them. Olive ridleys caught before they reach the beach. Dugongs entangled while feeding.

This is bycatch, meaning animals caught in gear set for something else, and it is why decades of legal protection have not produced the result the law promised. Schedule I makes it an offence to hunt an animal. It does not make a trawl selective.

Sea cucumbers are the exception, and a useful one. There the harvest is deliberate and illegal, the ban is comprehensive, and the trade continues anyway. Between them, the two cases cover the whole failure: a law that cannot reach accidental capture, and a law that can reach deliberate capture but is not enforced across enough coastline.

Comparison of targeted fishing for tuna and unintentional bycatch of sharks, sea turtles and other marine animals | India | Ocean Evoke India

There is a structural version of the same problem. A 2026 study reported by Mongabay India identified 11 Important Shark and Ray Areas across Indian waters on the Bay of Bengal side, and many of them fall outside the current protected-area network. Twenty-six shark and ray species currently receive legal protection in India, while more than three-quarters of the species group is threatened with extinction globally. India is, on a 2021 study, the world’s second-largest shark-fishing nation. Identifying a habitat is not the same as protecting it, and protecting a species list is not the same as protecting the places the species live.

Common questions

If these animals are protected, why are they still disappearing?

Because most of them are not being hunted. Protection under the Wild Life (Protection) Act makes it an offence to catch, keep or trade a listed animal deliberately. The dominant mechanism on this list is accidental: an animal comes up in gear set for something else. The seahorse figures make the scale visible, with 89 percent of an estimated 13 million a year caught by non-selective gear in a species that had already been protected for over a decade.

Is anything actually recovering?

Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. The dugong survey off Tamil Nadu recorded mother-and-calf pairs, which is evidence of breeding rather than merely of survivors. Chilika holds the largest concentration of Irrawaddy dolphins anywhere, but the January 2026 count of 159 was identical to 2025, and a flat number is stability, not recovery. Neither result is a trend on its own.

Conclusion

Ten animals, and for most of them the same answer. They are not disappearing because anyone decided to remove them. They are disappearing because they happen to be where the nets are, and because a law written to stop hunting cannot reach a net that was never set for them.

That is not a counsel of despair. It points somewhere specific. Gear selectivity, where fishing is allowed, and whether the places these animals actually live are inside a protected boundary are the levers that decide the outcome, and all three are policy and practice questions rather than questions of goodwill.

The dugongs off Tamil Nadu had calves with them, which is what it looks like when habitat protection is working in one place. If most of this loss is happening by accident, in gear set for something else entirely, what would change first: the gear, or the demand that puts it in the water?

Sources

 

Aqua Lung
Canon
Go Pro
Ikelite
Insta 360
Mares
Nauticam
PADI
Shearwater
TDI
Rotary Club of Calcutta South CIty
Kuddle Life Foundation
Coastal Impact