A research expedition underway this week on China's mighty but polluted and traffic-choked Yangtze River is racing against time to save one of the earth's rarest dolphins. The baiji, believed to be among the world's oldest fresh-water mammals, may already be extinct but an international team of scientists and ecologists are hoping against formidable odds that the dolphin has survived.
"We are just hoping the baiji are still here," Brent Stewart, a research biologist from Hubbs-Seaworld Research Institute in San Diego, said aboard the Kekao One, one of the expedition's ships. Expectations among the experts from China, Japan, Switzerland and the US that the baiji has overcome China's relentless environmental degradation are tempered by gritty reality.
Massive pollution from factories along the banks of the world's third longest river dump brown, foul smelling effluent into the water. Fisherman, their silhouettes dotting the river's turbid waters, cast lethal kilometer- (half-mile-) long nets that result in severe over fishing of the baiji's food source. The rolling hook fishing nets also inadvertently trap the baiji, while illegal dynamite fishing blows them to bits. Electrofishing stuns them just long enough so they can drown. Meanwhile, giant barges weighed down with coal, oil, gas, minerals -- among the many key resources China consumes to power its booming economy -- crowd the baiji out of its river home.
August Pfluger, co-expedition chief and head of Swiss-based baiji.org, an environmental group dedicated to saving whales and dolphins, put the baiji's chance of survival at around five percent.
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http://www.terradaily.com/2006/061116033155.b2a79eag.html
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