It’s a sad day for Hong Kong animal lovers. Over the weekend, two highly endangered Chinese white dolphins — also known as pink dolphins — were discovered dead on a beach on Lamma Island.

Yesterday morning, a man fishing at Kat Tsai Wan, off the west coast of Lamma Island, found that a 2.5 meter long pink dolphin had washed up on the shore. The man, surnamed Pak, told Apple Daily that he could tell from his boat that the animal was dead.

Following a citizen tip, Gary Stokes, the regional director for controversial marine conservation organization Sea Shepherd, alerted the Ocean Park Conservation Foundation Hong Kong (OPCFHK) and brought its response team to the site. Following a necropsy on the beach, the team found that the dolphin, an adult female, was actually carrying a full term, unborn baby (pictured below).

The calf, a 1.02 meter long male, was also dead. The foundation said in a statement that no net entanglement or evidence of physical trauma was found on either carcasses, and both were severely decomposed.

Stokes said in a series of video statements that the calf likely died inside its mother, and infected the female from the inside. According to Stokes, the OPCFHK team said the mother dolphin’s organs and flesh indicated that she was very healthy prior to her death.

However, the conservationist remarked that the animal’s death looked like a natural death, unlike many previous cases of the dolphins dying from human intervention (i.e. pollution and boating accidents). The OPCHK team has taken organ, blubber, and tissue samples back to its lab to test for microplastics.

“[It’s a] very sad day because we’ve actually lost an adult female and obviously they are the key animals in the species,” Stokes said. “Very sad day, we’ve lost another of our Chinese white dolphins, and we cannot be affording to lose any more.”

The pink dolphin was chosen to be the mascot for the 1997 handover, the 20th anniversary of which took place on Saturday. Since then, the pink dolphin population has declined dramatically from over two hundred in 1997 to just 40-something now.

The dolphins, who swim in brackish waters near North Lantau, have seen their habitat become smaller and more polluted in the past two decades from multiple land reclamation and construction projects, such as Chek Lap Kok Airport, town development in Tung Chung and Tuen Mun, and the ongoing construction of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.

Warning: Some readers may find these photos disturbing.

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