If Hong Kong’s pink dolphins could speak, the first words they’d say would probably be Lindsay Porter’s name. For nearly three decades, she has been the world’s leading expert on the beautiful, vulnerable animals, officially known as Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, as well as on the Indo-Pacific finless porpoises that are also indigenous to the city’s waters.

Originally from Scotland, Porter was partly raised in South Africa, where she originally got her love of the ocean. She studied forensic science at university but found the lab-based nature of the work frustrating. The opportunity to take a marine science course piqued her interest, and the rest is history.

Her mother had been a prisoner of war in China during the Second World War, and her uncle still lived in Hong Kong. When Porter visited him, a love affair with the city began.

“I just loved that you could live in a city that was so international and exciting and active, but in 20 minutes you could be in some of the most rugged coastlines in Asia,” she says.

She settled in Hong Kong in 1994, attempting to fill an important knowledge gap by studying the behaviour of the dolphins ahead of the construction of the new Hong Kong International Airport, which would affect their habitat. She intended just to stay for her PhD; she’s still here today.

After graduating, she joined the WWF, working as the conservation body’s dolphin conservation officer from 2001 to 2009. In 2020, she set up her own organisation, Seamar, as an umbrella for her activities. She says that over the years she has been affiliated with about half of the universities in Asia on various projects, and has worked at sites around the region. But Hong Kong keeps calling: the decision to build the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, for example, plunged her into another seven to eight years of studying the project’s potential impact on the dolphins, under the auspices of Scotland’s University of St Andrews. “It was almost like doing my PhD again,” she says. “The difference was that there was a lot more money.”

The challenges to the dolphins’ habitat and her work studying it are apparently without end: most recently, it’s the impact of the new third runway at the airport that she’s been looking into.

With a job that’s very hands-on and involves a lot of travelling, the pandemic has been a challenge. It hasn’t been without its positives, though. “I was able to focus exclusively on Hong Kong’s dolphins and porpoises. The day the fast ferries stopped, the dolphins’ behaviour changed very quickly: socialising increased and there were more calves than normal.”

She is also the vice chair of the scientific committee at the International Whaling Commission, only the third woman to fill that role in the organisation’s 75-year history, responsible for the science that underpins the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling.

“What I really enjoy doing is putting Asia on the map,” she says. “Even though I’m not Asian, I get to showcase so much of the fantastic work that Asian scientists do.”