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Wei Qiwei, an aquatic life scientist, said he was saddened but not surprised that the Chinese paddlefish has been officially declared extinct.

In fact, the Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institution researcher came to the same death-knell conclusion in a paper published in 2019, three years before the official announcement from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

At the time, Wei hypothesized that the fish had become extinct sometime between 2005 and 2010, based on decades of study.

“The last wild Chinese paddlefish we spotted was in 2003,” he said. “It was over 3 meters long, and we estimated it was in its 20s — middle age for the species. Yet we never found any other individual since then.”

He added: “Now 20 years later, that last paddlefish might have gone as well. When the last individual dies, the species is considered extinct.”

The real question for Wei is: What’s next? Aquatic and amphibian and even reptile life, especially mid-to-large-size species, is under threat in the Yangtze River. Dabry’s sturgeon, or the Yangtze sturgeon, has already been listed as extinct by the international conservation union. Baiji, or Yangtze white-fin porpoise, is deemed “possibly extinct” in the wild, with its population relying entirely on artificial reproduction. The Yangtze finless porpoise, Yangtze alligators and Chinese giant salamanders are considered critically endangered.

Although they belong to different classes, these species have much in common. They lived in the Yangtze for tens of millions of years before the effects of human activities in recent decades led them to breeding difficulties that decimated their populations.

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We wanted to track it and find its spawning ground, but we eventually lost contact with it. We tried to find it for the next decade, but the effort was in vain. Our hope became the last goodbye.

Wei Qiwei Aquatic life scientist