The Goddess of Yangtze ‘spotted’
MORE than a decade has passed since the Goddess of the Yangtze, more prosaically known as the Chinese baiji dolphin, was declared “functionally extinct.”
Yet a recent image of the longmissing dolphin has sparked hope for its reappearance as Asia’s longest river recovers its ecological vitality.
Though the dolphin was believed by many to have gone extinct in the wild, some environmental scientists have never stopped believing that, somewhere along the vast drainage of the world’s third longest river, a few remaining members of the rare species may be fighting for survival, far away from human activity.
This week, the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation released a photograph of a baiji lookalike, captured last month in a section of the Yangtze near Wuhu in the eastern province of Anhui.
Previous reports had been circulating about fishermen spotting a few of the blueishgray mammals twice, both adults and young calves.
The foundation claimed that several researchers who have worked closely with the baiji or specialized in its study confirmed the image to be a surviving specimen of the species.
“Though the baiji is very likely to have gone extinct in the wild, the possibility remains that a few last surviving specimens could still be out there,” said Wang Kexiong, professor with the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan.
The institute said it would be imprudent to identify the animal in a photograph without further evidence. Nonetheless, it is too soon to label the species “extinct.”
The proof goes beyond just one image, said Su Fei, director of the development foundation’s baiji program. For three years, the foundation has been organizing observation trips to raise protection awareness about the Yangtze’s freshwater dolphins. Last May, several observers were confirmed to have witnessed the elegant mammal.
The baiji does not live in solitude, said Li Xinyuan, an investigator and baiji dolphin enthusiast who was present when the April image was taken, describing the moment of encounter as “extremely emotional.”
“For two days straight, our teammates witnessed the baiji, but it was gone before they could press the shutter. On the third day, the photographer Jiao Shaowen decided to use a camera lens, rather than binoculars, to observe the water’s surface, so he was able to take the shot the instant the baiji emerged,” said Li, who led an ex-situ conservation project on the baiji in the 1980s.
He believes that if one was spotted, there could be a small school nearby.
“It is noticeable that the river’s water quality and ecosystem have kept improving, thanks to state-led protection efforts,” he said, stressing that hope prevails for the species to recover in number if environmental improvement continues.
“To salvage the probable surviving baiji dolphins, emergency actions need to be taken with the country’s best resources, talent and technology,” said Hua Yuanyu, one of the scientists who surveyed the species three decades ago.
The baiji is a unique freshwater dolphin known to only inhabit the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, where it had flourished for more than 20 million years, until industrialized fishing and a boom in transport in recent decades pushed the species to the edge of extinction.
In ancient times, the aquatic mammal was regarded as the goddess of protection for fishermen and boatmen along the 1,700-kilometer waterway from central China all the way to the Pacific.
Once described as “numerous,” the last known living baiji died in captivity in 2002. The species was declared “functionally extinct” the following year.