Pakistan's Blind Dolphins
Mr Mirani was once a fisherman and is now among a handful of people officially assigned to protect the dolphins. "I treat them as my children and do everything whenever a dolphin is trapped in shallow waters," Mr Mirani said. "No one can know them as meticulously as me. I was born in a boat and have been living with these fish ever since.
"Look at my eyes," he said. "Aren't they shaped like the fish?"
Indus dolphins - platanista gangetica minor or "bulhan" in the local Sindhi language - are listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union.
According to local folklore, a lactating woman once refused to give milk to a saint, who cursed her and pushed her into the Indus. The woman turned into a dolphin and the freshwater species was born.
Females are bigger than males, weighing up to 110 kilograms and growing up to 2.5 metres long.
The brownish-pink mammals have lived alongside humans for time immemorial.
Their long, pointed snouts thicken at the end and the upper and lower teeth are visible even when the mouth is closed.
Their numbers are declining as fishermen deplete their stock of food, pollution worsens, and a network of barrages restricts their movements. Falling water levels due to declining rain and snowfall are another peril.
The Worldwide Fund For Nature Pakistan estimated in 2006 there were around 1,200 Indus dolphins left - 900 at a sanctuary near Sukkur in the southern province of Sindh and another 300 further upstream in Punjab.
The dolphin is blind because it lacks eye lenses and so hunts for catfish and shrimp using sophisticated sonar, Hussain Bux Bhagat said, who is a senior official in the Sindh wildlife department...
