Wild dolphin populations face mounting welfare threats from marine pollution including plastic ingestion, chemical contamination, noise pollution, and entanglement in fishing gear.
Marine pollution creates chronic welfare harms for wild dolphins that are invisible to casual observers but measurable in physiological and behavioral research. Dolphins swimming through chemically contaminated waters carry body burdens that compromise their immune systems, reduce reproductive success, and may cause pain through tissue damage. Noise pollution disrupts the acoustic environment that dolphins depend on for social communication, navigation, and prey detection. The cumulative burden of plastic, chemical, noise, and entanglement threats falls on individual animals who cannot escape or mitigate these anthropogenic stressors.