The Chinese Baiji Declared Extinct

After six weeks of intensive surveying, no Baiji were found. Overfishing and dam building played a major role in this species going extinct.

The announcement of the results of an extensive survey of the Yangtze late last year are only making official what has been suspected for some time. The Yangtze River Dolphin or Baiji (Lipotes vexilifier) is now considered Functionally Extinct. The Three Gorges Dam, heavy boat traffic and fishing on the Yangtze have spelled the end for this rare freshwater dolphin.

The Baiji has been listed as Critically Endangered since 1996. Efforts to find and trap a small population for captive breeding and protective care in a sheltered oxbow called the Shishou Reserve began in the mid 1990s. But the survival rate was poor and when the famous QiQi, a lone male residing in a pool in Wuhan’s Institute of Hydrobiology, died in 2002, hope faded even further. Now the hope is gone, despite a rebuttal by the lead scientist on the survey, saying that there was a chance that a few animals could still be alive.

It is highly unlikely that the species can endure. If finding animals for captive breeding was difficult when the population estimates were over 100 animals, there is little likelihood that new efforts will succeed. Planned interviews of fishermen and others living and working along the Yangtze River may turn up so anecdotes and leads but the river is so badly polluted, so heavily trafficked and fished, that any surviving animals are unlikely to reproduce.

The worst of it is, this is just the beginning. There are a number of other species hanging on by a similar thin thread, some of them will not survive either.