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Tragic news, everyone. The Chinese River Dolphin has been declared extinct. The Wikipedia entry has details. Selected exerts:
As China developed economically, pressure on the river dolphin grew swiftly. Industrial and residential waste flowed into the Yangtze. The riverbed was dredged and reinforced with concrete in numerous locations. Ship traffic multiplied, and the size of the boats grew. Fishermen employed wider and more lethal nets, robbing the dolphin of its food and occasionally killing one in the catch.
Noise pollution made the nearly blind animal prone to collisions with propellors, while fish nets killed many others. The Three Gorges Dam has irrevocably altered the habitat of the Chinese River Dolphin. Stocks of the dolphin's prey species had declined drastically in recent decades, with populations of some fish declining to one one thousandth of their pre-industrial levels.
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The most endangered cetacean in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the species was last sighted in September 2004. The Xinhua News Agency announced on 4 December 2006 that no Chinese River Dolphins were detected in a six-week survey of the Yangtze River conducted by 30 researchers. The failure of the Yangtze Freshwater Dolphin Expedition raised suspicions of the first unequivocal extinction of a cetacean species due to human action (some extinct baleen whale populations might not have been distinct species). Poor water and weather conditions may have prevented sightings, but some scientists declared it "functionally extinct" on 13 December 2006 as fewer are likely to be alive than are needed to propagate the species. |
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