The Loss of The Baiji

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You have probably never heard of the baiji—the graceful, grey dolphin endemic to the Yangtze River with tiny eyes and a long narrow beak. If you ever visit China, chances are you will never see one.

The baiji may be extinct. A survey carried out in March this year by a team of experts from China, the US, UK and Switzerland failed to locate a single baiji. The last confirmed sighting was in September 2004. The baiji, Lipotes vexillifer, may be the first species of cetacean—whale, dolphin and porpoise— to become extinct in modern times. The extinction will have taken place at a time of unprecedented interest and concern for their large relative, the minke whale.

It is perhaps a sad reflection of humanity’s inability to prioritise effectively on the basis of need, that so many resources and so much publicity has been devoted to ‘saving whales’, while the fate of this small freshwater cetacean has gone mostly unreported.

Indeed, just last summer, Greenpeace sent two ships to the Antarctic to save minke whales. We saw images on national television of young activists in rubber inflatables manoeuvring between Japanese whaler and whale. But minke whales are not about to become extinct. In fact there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of minke whales.

In terms of the world’s cetaceans, there is no greater need than a plan of action to save the freshwater dolphins and porpoise that are just hanging on in Asia’s rivers. This includes the Ganges, Indus and Irrawaddy dolphins and the finless porpoise.

It has been argued that the baiji are the most important species within this group because the baiji is a whole separate genus. Randall Reeves, Chair of the Cetacean Specialist Group at the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), has suggested that their disappearance would be like the ‘snapping off a complete branch from the tree of mammalian radiation’.

Dr Reeves believes that a small number of baiji are surviving at low population densities and that funding is needed for an ambitious plan to find, capture and move them to a semi-natural reserve. He believes that it is still possible to establish a breeding population of baiji in the relatively protected environment of the Tian-e-Zhou oxbow.
This is a 21-kilometre long stretch of water adjacent to the Yangtze River.

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