Yangtse Dolphin "possibly Extinct".

[Lateral Line]

Another pat on the back for our race. BBC story it is around on other sites as well.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

This is pretty terrible. China should be deeply ashamed about itself for letting this happen (which is basically did)...The Yangtze river dolphin was a beautiful, noble and mysterious animal, intelligent and graceful, the loss of this dolphin is a great tradgedy and shame.

The Yangtze river is becomming terribly polluted now days, even if the fish aren't wiped out by the many forms of unregulated fishing, the suffocating toxic pollution being illegally and legally dumped by all the factories and slums that sit on its banks into the river will kill or at least harm any fish and other animals that do survive. Too much boat traffic, too many dams being built, too much corruption and negligence- its like the Yangtze's wildlife is being attacked from every side.

And its not just the wildlife that is suffering either, many chinese who live off or next to the Yangtze river are suffering too.
But then again, all China seems to care about now days is its industrial revolution thing its got going on now and squeezing every last bit of profit out of its over-worked and under-payed peasant/rural population. Whether they suffer or not is not its concern, as long as they make money for the rich. So some people may even ask then, if China doesn't even care about its own people's welfare then why should we even expect it to seriously care about the survival and health of its native wildlife?
And as far as i am concerned, IMHO the only reason why China cares about its panda's is because it makes it look better in the eye's of others internationally, its had so much media coverage on panda's it can't brush them aside and hope people will forget about them like it can do with so much of the rest of its wildlife.


"Sigh"...Anyways...
I think that China should have made a lot more effort to take Yangtze dolphins from the wild so it could sustain a captive population so that it the current event of the dolphins extinction, it could have at least kept the species alive in captivity. And it should have sorted out the unregulated fishing problems in the river and so much more...One of the most powerful nations on earth, and it could not even control what went on in a single river?

 

[wendywc]

While I personally hate dolphins (don't shoot me); it is pretty incredible that this will be the "first extinction of a large vertebrate for over 50 years" --- according to the BBC article. This number actually seems long to me, especially with all current and recent destruction I've read about. Of course, that's really a very brief amount of time.

Also, for US zoos (don't know about UK or other countries), the zoos pay a $1 million a year in fees/rent money. So that is definately incentive for China to protect pandas. Although with contracts expiring (of zoos keeping pandas), I feel a quesy uncertainty about the distant future for them. Here's one article about that... http/www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/2...-1m5pandas.html


Back to the dolphins; another article can be found here (you have to register though): http/www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/science/...3c5&ei=5070

Here's the info for those who don't want to register.

A Fellow Mammal Leaves the Planet
By ROBERT L. PITMAN, NOAA Fisheries Ecosystem Studies Program
Published: December 26, 2006

Robert L. Pitman has spent 30 years studying the world’s whales, dolphins and other aquatic mammals. He returned to San Deigo, Calif., last week after a fruitless six-week expedition in which teams of five observers on two vessels scoured the Yangtze River from the Three Gorges Dam to Shanghai, seeking the last members of the rarest cetacean species of all, a white, nearly blind dolphin called the baiji, Lipotes vexillifer. The dolphin is now considered, at best, “functionally extinct.â€￾ Dr. Pitman wrote this note in response to a reporter’s question about the broader implications of this, the first apparent extinction of a cetacean in modern times.

Locally, the Yangtze River is in serious trouble; the canary in the coal mine is dead. In addition to baiji (Yangtze river dolphin), the Yangtze paddlefish is/was probably the largest freshwater fish in the world (at least 21 feet), and it hasn’t been seen since 2003; the huge Yangtze sturgeon breeds only in tanks now because it has no natural habitat (a very large dam stands between it and its breeding grounds). The whole river ecosystem is going down the tubes in the name of rampant economic development. There is a huge environmental debt accruing on the Yangtze, and baiji was perhaps just the first installment.

Globally, scientists have been warning for some time of an impending anthropogenic mass extinction worldwide. Previous bouts of human-caused extinctions were due mainly to directed take: humans hunting for food. What we are seeing now is probably the first large animal that has ever gone extinct merely as an indirect consequence of human activity: a victim of market forces and our collective lifestyle. Nobody eats baiji and no tourists pay to see it …quot; there were no reasons to take it deliberately, but there was no economic reason to save it, either. It is gone because too many people got too efficient at catching fish in the river and it was incidental bycatch. And it is perhaps a view of the future for much of the rest of the world and an indication that the predicted mass extinction is arriving on schedule.

For the Chinese, I think that losing a half-blind river dolphin and a couple of oversize fish was a fair trade for all the money that is being made there now. China is an economic model envied by most of the rest of the world, and I think that many other (especially third world) countries will be confronted with similar decisions of economic development versus conservation of habitats and animals, and the response will be the same. From now on we will have to choose which animals will be allowed to live on the planet with us, and baiji got cut in the first round. It is a sad day. I know it is their country, but the planet belongs to all of us. We came to say goodbye to baiji, but after its being in the river for 20 million years, we apparently missed it by two years.

Sorry if I got a little emotional here, but the disappearance of an entire family of mammals is an inestimable loss for China and for the world. I think this is a big deal and possibly a turning point for the history of our planet. We are bulldozing the Garden of Eden, and the first large animal has fallen. Robert L. Pitman, NOAA Fisheries Ecosysem Studies Program

Sorry if I added too much stuff to my post, but I find it all extremely interesting.

 

[Danno]

Just note that it is 'possibly extinct' in the wild. There are many types of extinction. This type of dolphin is not eradicaticated.