But on Aug. 8, an international team of researchers released their report officially declaring the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer), extinct. They based their sobering conclusion on a fruitless six-week expedition that four times scoured 1,000 miles of the Yangzte, from the Three Gorges Dam to the ocean port of Shanghai, in a visual and acoustic search for the gray, 8-foot, 500-pound freshwater cetaceans.
Ironically, the goal of the expedition was to collect any remaining baijis to transport them to a breeding facility in a Chinese nature reserve. But since the last confirmed sighting in 2002 — the same year the single baiji in a research institute died — one of the world’s most endangered species apparently crossed the threshold into extinction — the first large vertebrate to do so in 50 years, and the first cetacean species to be wiped out by human activity.
But we didn’t just lose a species, or even a genus. The baiji was so exquisitely unique that it merited its own taxonomic family among mammals — what amounts to a whole branch on the evolutionary tree of life.
Revered for centuries by Chinese fishermen as the Goddess of the Yangtze, the nearly blind dolphin made its home in the river’s deep, murky waters for 20 million years. But today, 10 percent of the world’s population lives within the Yangtze basin, and the river is a gritty portrait of China’s rapid economic development — jammed with thousands of cargo ships, barges, fishing boats and speedboats, laced with illegal long-line fishing nets, harnessed for hydroelectric generation and heavily polluted with industrial, domestic and agricultural wastes.
For the gentle baiji, the river became unlivable. The giant ships’ thundering engines scrambled the dolphin’s ability to navigate the opaque river by echolocation. The Three Gorges Dam lowered water levels downstream by 6 feet, concentrating toxic pollutants, and cut off the already declining supply of the fish that were the mainstay of the baiji’s diet. And while people did not eat the baiji, many dolphins wound up impaled on the hooks of long-line nets set for other aquatic game. In fact, entanglement as bycatch was reportedly the leading cause of death for baijis in the 1970s and ’80s, when scientists estimated the population at 400.
At the same time — and for the same reasons — other species unique to the Yangtze began precipitous declines: the 21-foot Yangtze paddlefish, which has not been sighted since 2003, Yangtze sturgeon; finless dolphin; and Chinese alligator, cousin of the U.S. Endangered Species Act success story.
And while the baiji’s numbers ran out first, the scientists involved with the search acknowledge that more extinctions in the Yangtze are probably inevitable because the time to take action has passed. In making a decision between economic development and conservation of habitats and animals, China chose prosperity — a choice the United States still frequently struggles with, and one that many developing countries will make in the future.
Still, endangered species — and healthy species in changing environments — have their champions.
The tragedy of the baiji’s extinction is exactly what member institutions of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (including Shedd) have been working to avert through their breeding programs for 161 species. This is one reason why Shedd Aquarium built the Oceanarium with spacious pools and a state-of-the-art veterinary facility: to create an environment in which beluga whales, Pacific white-sided dolphins and other marine animals would breed. Ten years ago we joined a group of North American zoological organizations in a cooperative beluga breeding program that to date boasts 18 successful births — more than twice the number born in the four preceding decades in which zoos and aquariums have kept belugas. Joining forces and sharing resources and databases resulted in exponential success. Four years ago we began a partnership with Sea World to study artificial insemination in Pacific white-sided dolphins, and we have since started working with belugas. Are belugas and Pacific white-sided dolphins critically endangered? No. Did we want to wait until they were before we tried to unravel the unknowns of their reproductive biology? Absolutely not.
It is too late for the funny-faced baiji, the Goddess of the Yangtze River, the remarkable and irreplaceable single member of a family of mammals 20 million years old. The 20th-century naturalist William Beebe wrote, “When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another Earth must pass before such a one can be again.”
If we honestly value the wondrous, riotous, enigmatic and enthralling parade of life with which we share this planet, each of us will take some step to prevent such a loss again. Animals connect us to the living world, inspiring us to make a difference. Find your connection. Make that difference.
