China's white dolphin called extinct after 20 million years

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Original source.

BEIJING, China (AP) -- An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team's leader saying one of the world's oldest species was effectively extinct.

The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction.

A few baiji may still exist in their native Yangtze habitat in eastern China but not in sufficient numbers to breed and ward off extinction, said August Pfluger, the Swiss co-leader of the joint Chinese-foreign expedition.

"We have to accept the fact, that the Baiji is functionally extinct. We lost the race," Pfluger said in a statement released by the expedition. "It is a tragedy, a loss not only for China, but for the entire world. We are all incredibly sad."

Overfishing and shipping traffic, whose engines interfere with the sonar the baiji uses to navigate and feed, are likely the main reasons for the mammal's decline, Pfluger said. Though the Yangtze is polluted, water samples taken by the expedition every 30 miles did not show high concentrations of toxic substances, the statement said.

For nearly six weeks, Pfluger's team of 30 scientists scoured a 1,000-mile heavily trafficked stretch of the Yangtze, where the baiji once thrived. The expedition's two boats, equipped with high-tech binoculars and underwater microphones, trailed each other an hour apart without radio contact so that a sighting by one vessel would not prejudice the other.

Around 400 baiji were believed to be living in the Yangtze in the 1980s. The last full-fledged search, in 1997, yielded 13 confirmed sightings, and a fisherman claimed to have seen a baiji in 2004, Pfluger said in an earlier interview.

At least 20 to 25 baiji would now be needed to give the species a chance to survive, the group's statement said, citing Wang Ding, a hydrobiologist and China's foremost campaigner for the baiji.

Pfluger, an economist by training who later went to work for an environmental group, was a member of the 1997 expedition and recalls the excitement of seeing a baiji cavorting in the waters near Dongting Lake.

"It marked me," he said in an interview Monday. He went on to set up the baiji.org Foundation to save the dolphin.

That goal having evaporated, Pfluger said his foundation would turn to teaching sustainable fishing practices and trying to save other freshwater dolphins. The expedition also surveyed one of those dwindling species, the Yangtze finless porpoise, finding less than 400 of them.

"The situation of the finless porpoise is just like that of the baiji 20 years ago," Wang, the Chinese scientist, said in the statement. "Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second baiji."

Pfluger and an occasional online diary kept by expedition members traced a dispiriting situation, as day after day team members engaged in a fruitless search for the baiji.

"At first the atmosphere was 'Let's go. Let's go save this damn species,"' Pfluger said. "As the weeks went on we got more desperate and had to motivate each other."
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Well...that's just grand. Just...grand.
 
Well, we've been trying for centuries, we've worked hard on it, and we finally did it.

We drove a cetacean specie to extinction.

Go us!

(NOTE : SARCASM)

More seriously - this is the sort of stuff that makes me feel *sick* inside (and want to cry. Yes, I do cry. I'm not the macho type). Stuff like this, and finding out that wildlife does better NOW at Chernobyl than it did before the meltdown. Even the fucking radiations from the worst nuclear catastrophe in history aren't as harmful to wildlife as *WE* are.

Doesn't that say something about just how thoroughly rotten our specie is?
 
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Evil Figment said:
Stuff like this, and finding out that wildlife does better NOW at Chernobyl than it did before the meltdown. Even the fucking radiations from the worst nuclear catastrophe in history aren't as harmful to wildlife as *WE* are.
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Wow, really?

...Dang.


That is really sad, though. It makes me wonder who else we'll lose in my lifetime.
 
^The tigers, Serebii.net, you know, the works!

:eek:

But this is sad...

:bash: <To the hunters!

:bheart: :banghead: :bawling:
 
It's not hunting. It's just us being there - our motorboats apparently fucked up their sound-based hunting.
 
It's a bit amazing that it ISN'T hunting, or even pollution. Those are always the front-runners for species extinction. It's just people out trying to make a living. It's...depressing, to say the least.
 
What's sad is that we don't appreciate the full value of things until they're gone forever. I bet in 40 years (If we even survive by then) there's going to be lots of regretting and crying over the blue whale.
 
Me and my cousin Absols-Darkness (is he signed up here? I'm not sure if he comes here since he's so busy at PE2K's forum...) were devastated to hear this news about two months ago, a day after the Baiji was confirmed functionally extinct. I wanted to meet it so bad...
 
This is one of the reasons beng a human being sucks. After reading about this I felt so contaminated by the evil things our species has done.
 
This is one of the reasons beng a human being sucks. After reading about this I felt so contaminated by the evil things our species has done.
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Better go dress up as a cat and write bad poetry.
 
Wolvorn said:
This is one of the reasons beng a human being sucks. After reading about this I felt so contaminated by the evil things our species has done.
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If being a human being sucks, what's it like being a Yangtze River dolphin? And i wouldn't call it 'evil'. If it has been wiped out it has been so mainly by people trying to eek out a living. Even most Elephant poachers aren't 'evil'. The people who buy the ivory are ignorant prats, but most (not all) poachers are poor people and there is a lot of money to be had in the tusks.

The main thing i take away from this is that at least there were people trying to save it. I see more good than evil in this. We need to change as a species because we are neglectful and abusive of the planet. That being said, poor people can't splash out on a carbon neutral house, and a lot of people in the third world would rather kill an elephant than die themselves.

Also, i'm not suprised that a large 'shy' and 'nearly blind' creature has become extinct. Think of the creatures that thrive in the modern human-dominated world. Indestructible cockroaches, rats, racoons and ever-more boistrous foxes. Large creatures that probably rarely reproduce and have small and fairly centred populations are going to be the first to go. Unfortunately, this includes pandas, sumatran rhinos, river dolphins etc. As these are some of the most loved and recognised creatures of all, it helps to make the situation even more depressing than it really is.
 
Wolvorn said:
After reading about this I felt so contaminated by the evil things our species has done.
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GrnMarvl13 said:
It's a bit amazing that it ISN'T hunting, or even pollution. Those are always the front-runners for species extinction. It's just people out trying to make a living. It's...depressing, to say the least.
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Should I feel bad for being a human? Like Grn said, they were only making a living. : /
 
Paperfairy said:
Should I feel bad for being a human? Like Grn said, they were only making a living. : /
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If making a living means only caring about money and not saving animals for our babies to see someday I would rather not, thank you:kiss:
We can say that the people cutting down all the world's trees are only 'making a living' untill the day they cut down the last one and there is no air -.-

We die, but hey, they only did it for money!:drowsy: Alot of good money does you when you die:dodgy:
 
Orange_Flaaffy said:
If making a living means only caring about money and not saving animals for our babies to see someday I would rather not, thank you:kiss:
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You'd rather die than make a living?
Sure >.>

Orange_Flaaffy said:
We can say that the people cutting down all the world's trees are only 'making a living' untill the day they cut down the last one and there is no air -.-
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We can live without the trees. Most of the oxygen being produce is produced in the oceans by phytoplankton and aquatic plants. And as it so happens we're effing this resource pretty bad as well. Don't get me wrong I'm against clearcutting of forests, but just saying, we can manage without. The thing about about cutting down trees, is that they provide shelter to other animals and make quite a sight as you're riding through them.

I always thought we humans are too smart for our own good. We've brought about another mass extinction, which bites. What makes this seem even worse is that we may not have even known about some species we wiped out. Now that we officialy figured out global warming is happening people may have another look at what we're doing to the world we live in and share with other animals.

Just take France for example, grabbing the bull by the horns and doing something about it; by shutting off the Eiffel Tower for five miuntes -.-;;
Or the Pope.
 
You must not fail to realize that we, as humans, are also part of this grand process we call Evolution. While it may be tragic to us (as beings who are capable of sentimentality and remorse) that the baiji is gone and likely because of our doing, we shouldn't look at the baiji's extinction as some evil, disgusting tragedy which would never have come about if not for humans. To think so is to think wrongly. :| There exists no multicellular creature on the planet today which has "always been around", and the number of species (of all sorts) today pales in comparison to the total number of plant, animal, and unicellular species which have ever been between 3.1 billion years ago and today. These two facts, together, strongly suggest the following claim is perhaps fact: the baiji was bound to vanish sooner or later, as are all of Earth's creatures. And that this is a natural process which has been going on long before humans ever existed. We are merely the newest tools in Mother Nature's arsenal for weeding out old species and changing the course of taxonomic history.

What I'm trying to say is ... yes, it is sad that the baiji was driven to extinction by avoidable human causes. Things like noise pollution (which confused the creature) as well as overfishing up until the late 20th century. Very sad indeed. But if it were not the humans who would have killed off the baiji in the year 2007, then it would have been other aquatic species who outcompeted the baiji in the Yangtze for food in (say) the year 5000; or a change in the river's course in the year 7000; or any number of other competing factors.

In other words ... "all good things must come to an end." :( In true Buddhist spirit, the baiji has fallen victim to the universal truth of impermanence.
 
But that's like someone being shot at the age of 20 and saying "well, he was going to die anyway." To follow that very logic, why shouldn't we all just shoot yourselves now? We'll all die someday, right? The how and the why obviously don't matter.
 
Like I said, I am sad about the baiji dying out. I'm just saying that people are putting too much stock in man's role as "an evil destructive force plaguing Nature" and fail to realize that we are one of Nature's many tools. Humans tend to (arrogantly?) assume that our species exists outside of Nature and is antagonistic to all of Her aims; people assume that when we pollute, overhunt, or modify ecosystems that we are "going against Nature." I'm simply trying to point out that, whatever we do -- be it saving the planet or destroying it -- we are ourselves a part of the puzzle, part of "Mother Nature." Humans may be the most sentient animals on the planet, but we are still just that: animals. Creatures. "Life forms."



(Originally written at the beginning of this post, but it's entirely offtopic and sounds SO FLAMEBAITEY, even to my ears! >_<

Your challenge assumes that I believe life has a purpose. Luckily for you, I do :) , but that is my personal choice. I have never been convinced that there is fundamental proof (which will convince all) that there is purpose in living; and if one does choose to agree with the Buddhist mantra of "nothing lasts forever," then really, perhaps there is little point with bothering to stay around.

Anyway ... keeping it here just so you're informed where I stand, since you were the one who raised the issue of "suicide in the face of life's pointlessness." Dunno how much you really wanted an answer to that or not.)
 
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