"20 Million Years and a Farewell
GONE A baiji, which once lived in the Yangtze River.
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NYT - Published: December 17, 2006
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.” "
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The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (also known as the "IUCN Red List" and "Red Data List"), created in 1963, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species. It is maintained by the World Conservation Union.
The latest update is the 2006 Red List, released on 4 May 2006. It evaluates 40,168 species as a whole, plus an additional 2,160 subspecies, varieties, aquatic stocks, and subpopulations.
From the species evaluated as a whole, 16,118 are considered threatened. Of these, 7,725 are animals, 8,390 are plants, and three are lichen and mushrooms.
This release lists 784 species extinctions recorded since 1500 CE, unchanged from the 2004 release. This is an increase of 18 from the 766 listed as of 2000. Each year a small number of 'extinct' species are either rediscovered, becoming Lazarus species, or are reclassified as 'data deficient'. In 2002, the extinction list dropped to 759 species, but has been rising ever since.
The turtle is one of the longest-lived creatures Earth has known, but at least half of all turtle species are now in serious danger of extinction.
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