Hope for the baiji?

There are reports in the Chinese media of a sighting of the Baiji, the Yangtze River or White Flag Dolphin. The dolphin was declared to be functionally extinct by scientists just three weeks ago .

According to the Xinhua News Agency a “big white animal” was spotted and filmed by a resident of east China's Anhui Province on 19 August. The animal in the footage was confirmed to be a baiji by the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. However, Wang Ding, also from the Institute of Hydrobiology and a leading authority on the species, said that the sighting could not be confirmed 100% because of the distance, but that it looked and acted like a baiji.

Although the sighting provides a small cause for hope that the creature could survive in the wild, the outlook is not good. In the 1950s there were thousands of Yangtze River dolphins, but numbers have declined drastically due to industrial pollution, heavy river traffic and over-fishing. The last previous sighting of a wild baiji was in 2004. There are none in captivity.

The chances are that the baiji is about to join the likes of the Caribbean Monk Seal as a former resident of this planet.

The end of the Baiji

Scientists have concluded that the Yangtze River dolphin (aka baiji) is now almost certainly extinct. No trace of the dolphin was found during a recent survey of its habitat

The scientists writing in Biology Letters journal blamed unregulated fishing as the main reason behind their demise. Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London, one of the paper's authors, said "The Yangtze river dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over 20 million years ago. This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet. While it is conceivable that a couple of surviving individuals were missed by the survey teams, our inability to detect any baiji... indicates that the prospect of finding and translocating them to a reserve has all but vanished."

The scientists added that there were a number of human activities that caused baiji numbers to decline, including construction of dams and boat collisions. However, they concluded that the primary factor was probably unsustainable by-catch in local fisheries. “Unlike most historical-era extinctions of large bodied animals, the baiji was the victim not of active persecution but incidental mortality resulting from massive-scale human environmental impacts - primarily uncontrolled and unselective fishing," the researchers concluded.

The dolphin was the only remaining member of the Lipotidae, an ancient mammal family that from other marine mammals, including over 20 million years ago. The dolphin had a long, narrow beak and low dorsal fin; lived in groups of three or four and fed on fish.

This is not the first man made extinction – other animals have been hunted to extinction (Thylacine, Great Auk, Passenger Pigeon) and it is not going to be the last (Even in Europe one in six species of mammal, including the Iberian lynx and the monk seal, is endangered). I fear we will see many more such extinctions in our lifetimes