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Endangered Marine Animals of India: A Status-by-Status Guide to What's Really at Risk

Endangered Marine Animals of India: A Status-by-Status Guide to What's Really at Risk

Author: Rohit Gupta

Published:

Dugong feeding on seagrass underwater | India | Ocean Evoke India

In September 2022 the Indian government notified a stretch of Palk Bay, off the Tamil Nadu coast, as the country’s first Dugong Conservation Reserve. The dugong now sits in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, which, in the government’s own words, gives it “the highest degree of protection” available under Indian law.

The same animal is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Not Endangered. Vulnerable, a step below

That is not a contradiction, and it is not an error in either direction. Two different systems are answering two different questions, and almost every list of endangered marine animals of India you will find treats them as one. Sorting that out is worth more than another countdown, because once you can tell the two apart, you can read any conservation status you come across, including the ones in this article

A note on scope before the species. Everything below lives in the sea. That excludes the Ganges river dolphin, which is freshwater and which people search for more than every marine term here combined. It also means there is no ranking. Ranking species by how doomed they are requires a defensible method, and the evidence available does not supply one, so this guide groups by status and names the authority behind each label instead.

What “endangered” actually means in India

Two systems are at work, and they do not track each other.

The IUCN Red List is a global scientific assessment of extinction risk. It sorts species into categories, from Least Concern through Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered, based on population size, trend, range and threat. Scientists produce it, it applies worldwide, and it carries no legal force anywhere. A Red List category is a measurement, not a rule. It also has a date, and that date matters, because assessments are revised as evidence changes.

The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 is Indian law. Its schedules determine what you may not hunt, possess or trade, and what happens to you if you do. Schedule I carries the strongest penalties. This is a legal instrument, not a risk ranking, and inclusion in it does not mean a species is more threatened than one left out.

The gap between them is wider than most readers expect, because India’s marine listings are recent and were added to a statute built for land animals. Until the amendment of 2001, the Act’s schedules contained no fish species at all. The first was the whale shark. Corals came under the Act in the same year, along with a range of sharks and rays and molluscs.

Shivani Swami, writing a legal analysis of the Act in 2021, argued that this is precisely the problem. The law was, in her words, “oriented terrestrially”, species selection has not been consistently guided by scientific data, and the Act makes no provision for the fishing communities whose livelihoods depend on marine resources. That is her argument rather than a settled finding, but it explains why a list of legally protected marine animals in India reads so differently from a list of endangered marine species in india assessed by scientists.

So when you meet a status in the wild, the useful question is not “how bad is it” but “which system is this, and when was it decided”.

Comparison of the IUCN Red List and India's Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, illustrated with a whale shark and sea turtle | India | Ocean Evoke India

The dugong: vulnerable on paper, protected like a tiger

The dugong is a seagrass-grazing marine mammal of India’s shallow coastal waters, and the two places where its numbers have actually been counted are Palk Bay and the Gulf of Mannar.

Globally the dugong is Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. An important qualification belongs here: that is a worldwide category, and no separate assessment of India’s dugong population was found for this article. The global figure describes the species everywhere, not the animals in Palk Bay.

Indian law takes a firmer view than the global category might suggest. The dugong is listed 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 across Thanjavur and Pudukkottai districts, declared under the same Act for the dugongs and the seagrass-associated species they depend on.

Then came the part that is genuinely encouraging. The Wildlife Institute of India, working with the Tamil Nadu Forest Department, carried out the country’s first systematic drone-based dugong survey. It estimated 270 animals along the Tamil Nadu coast: 158 in Palk Bay and 112 in the Gulf of Mannar. The survey also recorded mother-and-calf pairs, which is the detail that matters most, because it means the population is breeding rather than merely persisting.

Read that number carefully. It covers two named water bodies, not the country. One estimate at one point in time is not a trend. And it comes from reporting on the Institute’s assessment rather than from the assessment itself. Within those limits it is still the most concrete piece of good news in this article.

The whale shark: the first fish India ever protected

The whale shark is a very large filter-feeding shark, and it has the clearest story of a status changing.

For years the whale shark was assessed as Vulnerable. In July 2016 the IUCN moved it to Endangered, reporting that numbers had more than halved over roughly the preceding 75 years. Fisheries catches, entanglement in nets and strikes from vessels are among the pressures named. Those are global figures, and no India-specific whale shark trend was available for this article, but the direction of travel is not in dispute.

There is a lesson in how unevenly that change propagated. The Convention on Migratory Species, an intergovernmental treaty body, still lists the whale shark as Vulnerable on its own species page. Neither record is dishonest. One has simply not caught up with the other, which is exactly why a category without a date is worth so little.

India acted well before the reassessment. In 2001 the whale shark became the first fish species ever included in the schedules of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, following sustained campaigning over the hunting of the animals off the Gujarat coast for export. Before that amendment, the Act, nearly three decades old by then, protected no fish at all.

The whale shark is therefore a useful worked example of both systems at once. Its Indian legal protection arrived in 2001 and has not changed. Its scientific status changed in 2016. Neither event tells you anything about the other.

Sea turtles: the olive ridley and the arribada

Five sea turtle species occur in Indian waters: the olive ridley, green, hawksbill, leatherback and loggerhead. All but the loggerhead nest on Indian mainland or island coasts, and sea turtles are protected under the Wild Life (Protection) Act.

Of the five, only the olive ridley’s conservation status can be stated here with a source that names its own authority. NOAA Fisheries records the olive ridley as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. The categories widely quoted for the hawksbill, green, leatherback and loggerhead are left out deliberately, because no source retrieved for this article dated them, and publishing an undated category would contradict the standard this article asks its readers to apply.

What makes the olive ridley remarkable is the arribada, synchronised mass nesting, where thousands of females come ashore together over a few nights to lay. India has three recorded arribada sites, all in Odisha: Gahirmatha, the Devi river mouth and Rushikulya. A newer mass nesting site has also been reported in the Andaman Islands.

Which raises the obvious question. How can an animal that nests in those numbers be considered at risk at all? Because a category reflects trend and threat, not abundance. Arribada totals swing enormously from season to season, and a beach can look busy in the year its population is falling.

The animals most readers have never heard of

Beyond the familiar species, the reach of Indian marine protection covers animals that rarely appear on any list.

The Indian Ocean humpback dolphin

The Indian Ocean humpback dolphin is a coastal dolphin whose range runs from the southern tip of Africa to the southern tip of India, taking in the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and islands including Sri Lanka and Madagascar. It reaches India’s southern and western coastal waters, so it is not a nationwide species.

The IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Cetacean Specialist Group listed the humpback dolphin as Endangered as at November 2024, and points to the animals’ proximity to heavily populated coastlines, along with shipping and its associated infrastructure, as the core of the problem. Whale and Dolphin Conservation puts the emphasis slightly differently, naming incidental mortality in fishing gear as primarily responsible, with habitat loss and degradation contributing. Both descriptions point at the same coastal-development pressure.

In early 2024, researchers formed the Indian Ocean Humpback Dolphin Conservation Network, bringing together 72 scientists from 17 countries in the first coordinated effort across the species’ whole range.

Sawfishes

Sawfishes carry a long toothed rostrum that makes them catastrophically easy to entangle in netting. Every sawfish species is now assessed by the IUCN as either Endangered or Critically Endangered, and all are listed on Appendix I of CITES, the international trade convention’s strictest tier.

They have been protected under India’s Wild Life (Protection) Act since 2001. Fishing is the principal threat, with habitat loss secondary.

One distinction is worth holding on to here, because it is routinely lost. CITES Appendix I bars commercial international trade. It does not govern what happens in a net inside Indian waters. Trade controls and fishing pressure are separate problems requiring separate remedies.

Sea cucumbers

In 2001 the Government of India imposed a blanket ban, listing every holothurian species under Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act and ending the sea cucumber fishery and trade outright. Not the threatened ones. Every species in Indian waters, regardless of any individual assessment of its extinction risk. ICAR-CMFRI, the national marine fisheries research institute, describes it in exactly those terms.

The ban has not ended the trade. India remains a significant source of illegally traded sea cucumbers. That gap between the law on paper and the animals in the water is the theme of the next section.

Why protection on paper is not protection in the water

If hunting these animals has been illegal for two decades, why are so many of them still in trouble?

Because for several of them, nobody is hunting them. They are being caught by accident.

Bycatch, meaning animals caught in gear set for something else, is the through-line running across the species in this article. Researchers name it as the primary driver of humpback dolphin mortality. It is also the mechanism by which sawfishes, whose rostra snag in almost any net they meet, continue to decline despite comprehensive legal protection. A ban on deliberate killing does very little about a net that was never set for you.

The sea cucumber case adds the other half of the picture. There the harvest is deliberate and illegal, and the ban is comprehensive, and the trade continues anyway, because a prohibition is only as strong as the enforcement behind it across a coastline of thousands of kilometres.

Habitat is the third pressure, and it operates whether or not anyone is fishing at all. The same forces shrinking India’s coral reefs reduce the places these animals feed and shelter.

Protection, in other words, is not one thing. Listing a species is the beginning of the work rather than the end of it, and the reason the Palk Bay dugong reserve is interesting is that it protects a place and a food source rather than only prohibiting an act.

How to read a conservation status yourself

Three questions will let you assess almost any claim about a species’ status.

  1. Who assessed it? The IUCN and its Specialist Groups, a government scientific agency, a national research institute, or an unnamed website. If no body is named beside the category, the category is decoration.
  2. When? The whale shark was Vulnerable until July 2016 and Endangered after it, and at least one treaty body still shows the older category. An undated category is a category you cannot use, because you do not know which assessment it came from.
  3. Is this science or law? A Red List category measures extinction risk globally and binds nobody. A schedule under the Wild Life (Protection) Act binds everybody in India and measures nothing.

Apply those three to any list of endangered marine animals of India, including this one, and most of what is circulating will not survive the first question.

Common questions

Why do some sources call the dugong endangered when the IUCN category is Vulnerable?

Because the word is doing two jobs. In general writing, “endangered” is a loose term meaning at risk, and a headline about a threatened species will reach for it without any technical intent. The IUCN uses it precisely, as a defined category one step above Vulnerable. The dugong’s global category is Vulnerable, and no separate assessment of the Indian population was found for this article, so anyone writing “endangered dugong” is either using the everyday sense or repeating a category they have not checked. Both are worth noticing, because the same slippage runs through most species coverage.

Does Schedule I mean a species is more at risk than one that is not listed?

No, and the sea cucumbers are the clearest proof. In 2001 India listed every holothurian species in its waters under Schedule I in a single stroke, without reference to any individual species’ extinction risk. Schedule I answers a legal question, namely what may not be hunted, held or traded. It does not answer a scientific one. A species can be in serious trouble and unlisted, or comfortably abundant and listed. To learn how threatened something is, you need the assessment, not the statute.

Conclusion

The species in this article are at risk in genuinely different ways, and the labels attached to them come from two systems that were never designed to agree. The dugong is globally Vulnerable and legally protected to India’s highest standard. The whale shark’s science changed in 2016 while its Indian legal status stayed where it was set in 2001, and at least one international record still shows the older category. Every sea cucumber in Indian waters is protected as a group, and the trade in them continues regardless.

What connects them is that the label alone tells you almost nothing. Who assessed it, when, and under which system: those three answers turn a status from a word into information you can act on.

The Wildlife Institute of India’s drone survey found 270 dugongs off Tamil Nadu, and mothers with calves among them, which is what a working conservation reserve looks like from the air. One number, from two bays, in one season. The interesting question is what you do with a status once you can actually read it. Does it change what you buy, where you dive, or which of these animals you go and find out more about?

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