An isolated population of Indus river dolphins was found in the lower Beas in 2007, roughly 600 kilometres from the species' range in Pakistan.
Counts: five in 2011-12, a maximum of four between 2013 and 2018, and never more than three since 2018. Fewer than ten animals in total have ever been recorded here.
They hold to two stretches about fifteen kilometres apart, near Verowal and Gagrewal, and downstream near Karmowala and Mundapind. Since 2015 they have mostly been downstream of Beas town.
The threats are gillnet entanglement, industrial pollution, water-level swings from upstream hydropower, and the risk of being washed through the Harike barrage. Researchers on the population include Dr Sandeep Behera and Karunesh Singh.
Almost nobody in Punjab knows they are there.
The population was described in 2019 after a survey by the state wildlife department with WWF India. It had not appeared in any scientific literature before that, though the fishermen on that stretch knew the animals were there.
The reach of the Beas concerned was declared a conservation reserve in 2017 and the dolphin was made the state aquatic animal of Punjab in 2019. Neither step changed the water regime, which is set by the barrages upstream.
The Indus dolphin is functionally blind and navigates by echolocation, which makes it particularly vulnerable to noise and to shallow water. The species survives elsewhere only in the Indus in Pakistan, where the main population is in Sindh.