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 [↩]