This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most dolphins the public pictures are grey, sleek, and creatures of the open ocean. The Amazon river dolphin breaks both assumptions at once. As it matures it can turn pink, sometimes strikingly so, with males typically pinker than females, all bound up with a body built for a different environment entirely: flooded forest, narrow channels and river confluences rather than open water. Its neck vertebrae are not fused, unusual among cetaceans, letting it turn its head in every direction to navigate the tangled, root choked spaces a rigid necked ocean dolphin never has to enter, and it hunts more than fifty prey species there using echolocation, since the rivers it lives in are often too turbid for sight to do much work at all.
It is also among the largest freshwater dolphins on Earth, adult males running 219 to 249cm, about 16 percent longer than adult females, and it lives nowhere but the Amazon, Orinoco and Madeira river basins of South America, mostly alone or in small pods of three or four rather than the larger groups typical of marine dolphins. That restricted range is also what makes it vulnerable: it cannot simply move to another river system if its own becomes degraded or overfished.
The species carries an IUCN status of Endangered, driven by drowning in fishing gillnets and, more specifically, deliberate hunting for use as bait in the piracatinga fishery, a fish that has developed a taste for dolphin flesh as bait and created a direct economic incentive to kill dolphins that did not exist a generation ago. This atlas's own Freshwater biome carried zero species of its own before this entry; the Amazon river dolphin is its first.