Photo courtesy Cetacean Society International
The baiji has been declared extinct.
From the AP story linked above:
A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for millions of years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat.
The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.
For the baiji, the culprit was a degraded habitat — busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China, the expedition said.
“The baiji is functionally extinct. We might have missed one or two animals but it won’t survive in the wild,” said August Pfluger, a Swiss economist turned naturalist who helped put together the expedition. “We are all incredibly sad.”
20 million years. Jesus.
One good thing about the film “Independence Day” was the accurate portrayal of our species. We were the ones in the big spaceship. Dunno who the funny-looking naked monkeys were.
Any odds on the next large mammal to go? Primate, Cat, Cetacean?
In the words of Michael Leunig,
“We mourn the loss of certain species and pray for the deliverance of endangered ones. For the earth and its innocent creatures - we lament this sorrowful state. We resist this brutal invasion of the common soul.”