i have written about the baiji before, and probably will mention it again, but as it made headlines in CNN today, August 8, 2007…
this will go down as the day the yangtze rivier dolphin was declared “extinct”.
it makes me horribly sad.
that we humans can so callously wipe out another sentient species…
that for years and years every baiji dolphin is (to paraphrase douglas adams) born, lives her whole life, and dies in a world of noisy confusion, deafening blindness, and pain.
The long-threatened Yangtze River dolphin in China is probably extinct, according to an international team of researchers who said this would mark the first whale or dolphin to be wiped out due to human activity.
The Yangtze River dolphin, with its distinctive long nose, is likely to have been lost to the planet for ever
The freshwater dolphin, or baiji, was last spotted several years ago and an intensive six-week search in late 2006 failed to find any evidence that one of the rarest species on earth survives, said Samuel Turvey, a conservation biologist, at the Zoological Society of London, who took part in the search.
Chinese dolphin ‘probably extinct’ – CNN.com