China's River Dolphin Declared Extinct
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By
Andrew C. Revkin
The New
York Times
20 million years and a farewell.
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The first species to be erased from this planet's great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin.
It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China.
On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji's only known habitat.
The Yangtze, Asia's longest waterway and thought to be akin to the Amazon long ago in its biological richness, now has a dominant species: the 400 million (and counting) people busily plying its waters and industrializing its banks.
For some 20 million years, the baiji, also called the white-flag dolphin, frequented the Yangtze's sandy shallows, using sonar to catch fish in the silty flow.
In the last few decades, the dolphin's numbers plunged as rapidly as the Chinese economy surged. The Yangtze's sandy shallows, which the baiji frequented, have largely been dredged for shipping.
The baiji sought fish that have been netted or driven from the river by pollution. And its sonar may have been disrupted by the propeller noise from boats above. A 1997 survey counted 13 baiji in the river. None of the dolphins survive in captivity.
In a telephone interview from Wuhan, China, August Pfluger, the founder of baiji.org, said it was a shame that more attention had not shifted from the oceans' more abundant cetaceans to the plight of those that live in rivers and are now essentially trapped, unable to escape human activity.
On Wednesday, Mr. Pfluger distributed a news release concluding that the baiji was "functionally extinct." (Decades must pass before international scientific organizations take the formal step of declaring it officially extinct.)
The name of the document was, simply, "The End."