White Dolphin Functionally Extict

An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in nearly fifty years another mammal, specifically an aquatic mammal, has gone extinct. In this case, it was the white dolphin, also known as the Baiji, which used to live in the Yangtze River in China. The dolphin had been known to exist for the last 20 million years."

Comments

heartbreaking

[nomadic]

Douglas Adams had a chapter on the efforts to save the baiji in

• Last Chance to See

, which is really an amazing book for those of you who haven't read it. The sadness of this situation will no doubt be marred by countless slashdot posts by the rabid anti-environmental right who tend to post on these sorts of stories.

Cataloguing DNA for future use

[ReverendLoki]

My question is, is anyone preserving DNA samples from the existing specimens? Maybe another 20 years it will be feasible to produce clones of the species. I'm not saying try and repopulate the species into the wild, though that could be an option, but rather perhaps just for preservation in a zoo or similar habitat. Whether or not this actually happens in the future, we'd need to start thinking about gathering and preserving the DNA samples now. If we hurry, it may not even be too late to come up with 20 to 25 unique sets to match the number the article suggests is the minimum number of dolphins needed to even hope for a resurgence of the species.

Re:Cataloguing DNA for future use

[sadr]

Saving the DNA might be useful, but for many mammals and birds, there's much more to behavior than just DNA.

While it is not as dramatic as aliens saving human DNA without any of our culture, many animals don't function well if they don't have their parents (or other members of their species) to teach them how to survive.

Combine it with needing the rest of their habitat, and it is almost meaningless to talk about trying to "preserve" the species that way.

Douglass Adams

[shrapnull]

Chinese river dolphins (of both the pink and white variety) are covered in a lesser-known but extremely good book by Douglas Adams called "Last Chance to See", which covers a variety of endangered species.

I love how the publicity for the dolphins led to a media circus that resulted in them actually being considered a delicacy in the area.

Choice quotes from the book here: Douglas Adams: Last Chance to See Quotes

Re:I can only say...

[Professor_UNIX]

Tornados, floods, deer ticks with lyme disease, falling rocks, little globulous things you can't even see, all of it trying its damndest to kill you every day you exist.

And yet the only species in the entire world that gives a damn about preserving other species is human beings.

Still time to save the finless

[MrCopilot]

From the expidition website:

Alongside the search for the Baiji, the scientists surveyed also the population of the endemic Yangtze Finless Porpoise, and the total was less than 400. The situation of the finless propoise is just like that of the baiji 20 years ago, sais Wang Ding, deputy director of the Institute of Hydrobiology Wuhan. Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second Baiji, said Wang Ding, deputy director of the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Science in Wuhan

http://www.baiji.org/expeditions/1/overview.html