Dolphins belong to the group of marine mammals called cetaceans. They hold a key place at the top of the marine food chain and are essential to preserving the ecosystem’s general equilibrium. However, various factors such as gillnet entanglement, climate change, fisheries bycatch, and plastic pollution have led to the endangerment of certain dolphin species, such as the Vaquita dolphins. Therefore, there is an urgent need for detection and classification methods to conserve these species and protect their populations. The application of cutting-edge deep learning models such as You Only Look Once (YOLOv8) for object detection is selected to detect Vaquita dolphins in satellite images. This methodology holds promise for enhancing our understanding of dolphin populations and informing conservation efforts in critical habitats. By leveraging YOLOv8 for detection, we have achieved promising results in identifying Vaquita dolphins with higher accuracy. The results demonstrated promising accuracy and performance metrics, with the YOLOv8 model achieving mAP of 0.927.