Baiji River Dolphin May or May Not Be Extinct

ozmanjusri writes "Major news outlets are reporting that after 20 million years, Baiji (Yangtze River Dolphin) are now officially extinct. This is apparently actually old news; it was announced on a Baiji conservation website in December of last year. One outlet, though, is claiming they may not quite be completely dead yet. The same scientist that filed the report leading the the declaration of extinction is still hopeful: '"This is only one survey and...you can't have a sample in a survey, so you cannot say the baiji all is gone by the result of only one survey," he said. "For example, there is some side channels or some tributaries [where] we cannot go because of a restriction of navigation rules, and also we don't survey during the night-time so we may miss some animals in the Yangtze River." Professor Ding says based on anecdotal evidence, he remains confident the dolphins are still out there. "I'm pretty much sure there are a few of them left somewhere in the Yangtze River," he said. "I keep receiving reports from fishermen, they say they saw a couple of baiji somewhere, sometime."'"

Comments

Re:i read somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's okay if I track you down and shoot you? After all, human beings die all the time. They did before I started locating strangers on the internet and shooting them, and they'll still die long after my bloody killing spree is ended by my death. It's not that big a deal, right?

  Note to parent poster: Death by natural causes is different from death by human intervention. The same goes for collective deaths, A.K.A. extinction.

Miracle Max

[LightPhoenix7]

See, there's a big difference between mostly extinct, and all extinct. Now, mostly extinct: they're slightly not-extinct. All extinct, well, with all extinct, there's usually only one thing that you can do...

In all seriousness, with so few members of the species, they're effectively extinct, and that's what counts. There may be one or two, but there's zero chance they'll balloon into a viable population. Even if we save genetic samples, we're decades, if not centuries, away from being able to reproduce an entire species, if we can even do that. Even if we have tissue samples from twenty different dolphins, and reproduce them through some hypothetical cloning technique, I'm not convinced that's enough genetic diversity to sustain the species.