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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."
Makes me feel bad about the tuna sandwiches I had for dinner last night.
I, for one, morn the loss of our potential aquatic overlords.
How did they taste?
Hindsight in 20-20 indeed. Maybe now governments will get the idea that if you want to protect a species, you actually have to protect it. Just sitting arond and holding press conferences and askind advisors endlessly will not solve a single thing. This crap needs to change, and soon.
.-.
Don't kid yourself. If a white dolphin ever got the chance he'd eat you and everyone you care about.
I know they're not really equivalent, but it's still funny to see this right above "New Zealand's First Land Mammal Discovered".
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
- 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.That's not true...We take the Lexus to the environmental rally on Sundays, Saturday is Hummer day.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
it sucks that they're gone, but times change and evolution is cruel mistress. they should have grown opposable thumbs 20000 years ago and stopped our ancestors from inventing the plow then maybe they would have stood a chance.
lose != loose
and thanks for all the fish!
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They called him Fripper, Fripper ...
Because this extinction can be directly traced to human interference. Because the animal was part of an ecosystem that has now been diminished, and human interference therefore harmed the entire ecosystem. Because diminished ecosystems are less resistant to new predators and diseases. Because diminished ecosystems have a point of no return at which they completely collapse, even if other species are still present.
Most importantly though, because the planet just got a little less interesting and wondrous.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Because maybe one of those extinct species was good at statistics.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
I agree. In the book he gives a poiniant description of the environment of the Baiji. Due to heavy traffic the river itself contains constant mechanical noise. For a creature that uses sonar to see and move life in white noise is blindness. He compared it sleshwere eloquently to spending your life in a snowstorm able to see but seeing nothing.
As much as people may want to celebrate this, or at least gloat, about the weak dying off and this being part of the "natural cycle" I say that's just a bit sick and way too short sighted.
I'm an environmentalist for many reasons chief among them is that I'm selfish. No matter how much we may like to hide in our offices we depend, completely depend, upon the life on the earth around us. Between Dolphins dying in the Yangtse, to the sheer number of ocean species that will die as the ice retreats the web we depend on is, strand by strand, being cut. Sitting around and saying "I told you so" to each other will do no good. Either we all (all animals) survive or we don't but resorting to simple stories gets us nowhere.
Find one (nouveau New Zealand mammal), lose one (Chinese White Dolphin). It evens out, no? :: Goes and votes Republican ::
I kid, I kid.
"First they came for the white dolphin, but I didn't say a word because I'm not a white dolphin..."
So say we all
20 Million Years.
Repeat after me: Twenty Million Years
Yeah, they just happened to have been naturally selected for extinction now, nevermind that we KNOW exactly what the cause of their decline has been, and that we KNOW it is because of OUR artificial impact on their natural environment.
You couldn't have picked a worse place or time to pull that steaming pile of shit out.
No Comment.
I /thought/ my tuna sandwich tasted different today.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
I won't believe the white dolphins are dying until Netcraft confirms it.
Sometimes stuff dies.
/. where software monoculture is almost universally agreed is a Bad Thing(r).
y Id=6299480
Marginalizing an important issue like biodiversity is fun isn't it?
This is
It stands to reason a biologic monoculture carries with it even more dire consequences than software. Our best interests are served to ensure there are as many species as possible walking/crawling/swimming around.
Let me give you an example. Bees. The American commercial bee population is a monoculture. In California the central valley bee population has been decimated by a disease that the bee keepers can no longer control. Guess what? No tree nut harvest. How about the other plants that bees pollinate? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
Now, what happens when it's cows or corn? Rice? Wheat? Please re-examine this belief carefully and mod parent down.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
And yet the only species in the entire world that gives a damn about preserving other species is human beings.
OK, so it's natural selection.
The problem is this: We can pick our actions. We cannot pick their consequences.
Anyone who thinks humans can't have an impact on the environment have their heads so far up their butts that the lump in their throat is their nose.
Our actions or lack of actions do have consequences, and we do have to live with those consequences.
I have no idea what the consequence of this species being lost will be, but I guarantee there will be consequences, and doubt very highly that they will be positive and produce a net gain in the world.
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Saturday is Hummer day.
I wish.
Oh, you meant the car. Sorry.
The difference between man and the "natural world" is poetic, not scientific. It is a romantic view, and it is irrational. We view nature as everything other than what we have created. Whenever we talk about nature, it is usually associated with the good and man is associated with the bad. However, when speaking of a scientific phenomenon such as natural selection it is stupid to separate man and nature. We are part of the ecosystem just like every other animal. The "destruction of nature" IMO is only dangerous as far as it affects us. The world is a cruel and harsh place, with or without humans. Extinction happens. Life on Earth was here long before we emerged, and it will be here long after we are gone.
20 Million Years.
Well that was plenty of enough time to evolve into something that can develop an industrial civilization and subjugate all other sentient beings.
If they didn't want to go extinct they could have spent all that time developing their own space program and left.
Or nuclear weapons depending if they were not in a "good mood" kind of species.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. The stupidity of all the organizations - from Greenpeace to the Chinese Government - that could have made a difference but chose not to make a difference that mattered is not the mundane stupidity we see in everyday life. This is a highly trained, highly refined breed of stupidity that only the truly gifted hand-wringer could develop.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's the dolphin bits that give tuna that great taste.
The bubble-era vision of a Utopian ocean is dented and dirty...The white dolphin has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
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
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"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
I figure that we could handle environmental changes far better than most species. First of all, we have considerable intelligence and tools that extend our "natural" adaptability. Second, how many other animals can thrive on 6 of the 7 continents (or all 7 if you let people use tools)? Third, we can eat a fairly varied diet, so our survival isn't dependent on any specific prey. Fourth, our population is enormous compared to the minimum number needed to sustain the species (i.e. not enter an extinction spiral/cascade). If 5 billion of us were to instantly just fall over dead, the human species still wouldn't be threatened with extinction. Of course, a significant climate change probably would kill a bunch of people, and make life kinda suck for the survivors, so it's in our best interest to prevent that from happening. Extinction is probably impossible for humans unless we do something really dumb, like ignite the atmosphere or create some super virus.
Um, just to clarify things, people who hunt are sadists.
Never met one. Every hunter I know goes to a lot of trouble to make sure that the animals they eat - which live in the wild and pretty much never die of old age - meet a rather instantaneous end. Do you eat fish? When was the last time you saw to it that your salmon had a nice peaceful death, or a completely abrupt one? Hooking or netting a fish is a painful, panicky thing, just like capturing crabs, or running cattle into a chute for slaughter. I take very seriously my opportunity and responsibility to take wild game in an ethical manner.
I also participate in keeping the eastern seaboard whitetail deer population under control. Since the natural predators are gone from suburbia, and such developments create ideal deer habitat, you wind up with many times the population of deer that were present even 300 years ago. When poor weather happens, or during the rut, you get vast number of these animals moving across highways or gathering in unnatually large herds. The result is painful (and sometimes drawn-out) death by injury from a vehicle, or very high rates of disease transmission from over crowding. People who want deer to live like that are sadists (to use your word). People who take the role that wolves used to play (in keeping the herds properly thinned out) not only are doing the species a service, but are also putting into their freezers some very healthy, lean meat that isn't soaked in steroids and anti-biotics, and which didn't involve huge farming operations (which burn tons of fuel and drench the soil with fertalizers) to raise and transport. While performing this little service, we (hunters) also pay large sums of money into state coffers, and support all sorts of wildlife conservation programs. Hunters do more to ensure the long term viability of wildlife (from ducks to deer to foxes and wild turkey) than most any other group.
Since you so obviously want everyone to know that you are a sadist you must be even more deranged than the average hunter.
Says the anonymous coward.
I'm more than happy to tell people where the holiday meal they're eating came from. In my family, it's nice pheasant appetizers followed by a really good venison roast. All taken by me, in the field, while on my two feet. While I'm at it, I pick up trash, dispose of old abandoned barbwire, report poachers to the game wardens, tell farmers what I've seen on their back 40, and reduce - by at least a few meals - the demand for factory farming and all of the waste that goes with it.
So, since you're a vegetarian, tell me everything you know about how the soybean farmers you buy from don't ever shoot the varmits that dig holes in their crop sections. Tell me how they tuck each groundhog and jackrabbit into bed every night. Do you sleep better at night knowing that the farmers you deal with use special combines that are guaranteed not to slowly crush voles, mice, and other small mammals as they drive over those animals' home turf? Oops! I forgot. That's simply not true, is it? Tell me what you know about the "organic" operations that, none the less, still practice ditch-to-ditch farming, thus reducing the very habitat that would provide homes for grouse or quail. You know, nature's little pest-bug patrol. In fact, tell me what you know about any of this whatsoever, since your previous comment would imply that you're an ignorant fool that thinks all food is produced by extracting it from rainbows, and delivered by My Little Pony to your grocery store. Hunters aren't sadists. But people who eat meat and wear leather without every personally doing the work of producing it are: cowards (and usually shrill, hypocritical asses, as well).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And keep in mind that all the other species on earth need us (or another species like us) and our clever monkey brains to figure out how to get off this rock before the sun explodes in a couple billion years. Otherwise all life that we know of will die and the whole entire exercise will have been pointless.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The late Douglas Adams (along with Mark Carwardine) wrote a book titled Last Chance to See about a number of animals on the brink of extinction. The chapter Blind Panic was all about the baiji dolphin's predicament. Practically blind, the baiji dolphin relied sonar to navigate the Yangtze river - the trouble is that the Yangtze is really busy and hence noisy and polluted. The baiji didn't stand a chance, though from the book it seemed that the Chinese did put a lot of effort into trying to save them.
Scott