A couple of years ago I wrote about the extinc­tion of the Baiji — or Yangtze River Dol­phin — and now, as the BBC reports, it looks like another large inhab­it­ant of the Yangtze is on the verge of fol­low­ing it, if it hasn’t already done so.

One of only two extant spe­cies of Pad­dle­fish, the Chinese Pad­dle­fish (Pseph­urus gla­dius,) which, with repor­ted sizes up to 7m long, may also be the world’s largest fresh­wa­ter fish¹ has not been detec­ted at all on a recent sur­vey. The team do admit that it’s quite pos­sible for isol­ated indi­vidu­als to have escaped detec­tion due to the sheer size of the area sur­veyed, but point out that the envir­on­ment can no longer sup­port a viable breed­ing pop­u­la­tion, and that unless some spe­ci­mens can be caught in time to begin a cap­tive con­ser­va­tion pro­gramme the spe­cies is doomed.

It’s depress­ing to be writ­ing about the extinc­tion of another large, eco­lo­gic­ally import­ant spe­cies so soon after the Baiji — doubly so since it was nat­ive to the same river sys­tem — and it’s no com­fort at all to know that there will have been plenty of other, less-​​visible (but no less tra­gic) extinc­tions in the same period, or that this is unlikely to be the last.

1. it is cur­rently not clear — and now may never be — whether the animal spends it’s entire life in fresh water [↩]

A little under a year ago, I blogged that the Baiji, or Yangtzi River Dol­phin was extinct. Well, I’m extremely happy to report that we may have been a little pre­ma­ture in writ­ing them off. The BBC is now report­ing that earlier this month, a Chinese fish­er­man saw and filmed what was most likely a Baiji swim­ming near the sur­face, and jump­ing from the water sev­eral times.

Even if this is con­firmed as a live Baiji, it doesn’t mean that there’s a viable wild breed­ing pop­u­la­tion. In fact it’s quite unlikely, but it raises some hope that enough live spe­ci­mens might yet be found to estab­lish a cap­tive breed­ing pro­gram, which could yet bring them back from the very brink of extinction.

If this teaches us any­thing, it’s that we shouldn’t be too quick to write off any spe­cies as extinct, just because we can’t see them. As the man said; “life finds a way.”

AP is report­ing that after a depress­ingly rapid decline, the Baiji, or White Dol­phin, of the Yangtze River has suc­cumbed to a com­bin­a­tion of over­fish­ing, hab­itat destruc­tion and heavy river traffic (which interfered with the animal’s sonar.)

The report is not unex­pec­ted (Baiji have been on the brink for years now,) but it is a sombre moment; this is a large mam­malian spe­cies (the first in my life­time) that has been driven to extinc­tion by human activ­ity. It’s hard to believe that an animal that had a viable breed­ing pop­u­la­tion in the 1980’s should have dis­ap­peared entirely. They were present recently enough that we have high res­ol­u­tion digital pho­tos of them, web­sites about them, the abil­ity to com­mu­nic­ate their demise (and unsuc­cess­fully attempt to fore­stall it) across the entire world in seconds, and yet, some­how, we let the creatures them­selves slip through our fin­gers. That speaks of dubi­ous pri­or­it­ies to me.

Let’s just hope that we, as a spe­cies, can learn from our mis­takes.

And, yes, I thought of the obvi­ous title, but John Lynch beat me to it.