River Dolphin Population “Dying”

Australian Associated Press (AAP) / The Age (Australia)
Monday 03 September 2007

The world’s river dolphin population is dying out thanks to bad environmental practices that also threaten the health of their human neighbours, an international environmental conference has been told.

The 10th annual Riversymposium, Australia’s largest river management conference, brings around 500 delegates from 40 countries to Brisbane from Monday to discuss river health, damming practices, drought and climate change.

WWF river dolphin initiative coordinator Anna Forslund said China’s Yangtze river, the Mekong river in Cambodia, the Ganges river in India and the Indus river system in Pakistan were among the world’s most endangered rivers as evidenced by their dwindling river dolphin populations.

Ms Forslund said many people had never heard of river dolphins, which were smaller than marine dolphins, had a longer snout and were often blind, but they were one of the most threatened species in the world with some populations now comprising between 1,000 to just a handful of wild creatures.

She said dolphin populations had been suffering from damming, overfishing, bad farming and mining practices, pollution and sewage since the 1970s.

“You can see the link, river dolphins are dependent on the water and the people are dependent on the water so the levels of toxicity is probably the same in people living there – low levels of dolphins means unhealthy water,” she said.

Outgoing WWF global freshwater program director Jamie Pittock said the case study of river dolphins was bad news for humans.

“They’re really the canaries of the rivers – if the river dolphin population is healthy then the river’s healthy,” Mr Pittock said.

“Millions and millions of people, well they’re suffering now, and they’ll suffer even more if the dolphins go extinct because extinction of the dolphins means that the rivers are terribly polluted, there’s not enough water, fish are dying and people in these countries are drinking the water from these rivers.”

He said many people did not realise humans were just as susceptible to the environment as animals.

He said around 50 WWF representatives were working in the countries to restore the health to the ecosystems by rescuing dolphins, providing farming education and reducing poverty so villagers had the resources to look after their own environments.

He said it was hoped outlining the program’s successes would prompt more scientists and financial backers from Australia to get involved.

SLOW DOWN – THE BAIJI IS NOT SAVED

It is being widely reported that the Baiji is not extinct as had been previously reported.

The story goes that someone filmed one of the animals jumping out of the water.

This reminded me of something from the book ‘Last Chance To See’ by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine who is a well-respected zoologist who usually works for BBC radio 4.

In this passage I am about to transcribe they are in China looking for the baiji in the 1980′s. They are talking about the difficulty of actually getting to see one in the Yangtze river. Douglas Adams is narrating…

Every momentary black shadow of a dancing wave looks for an instant like what you want it to look like and I did not even have a good mental picture of what to look for.

“Do you know how long they surface for?”, I asked Mark.

“Yes”.

“And?”

“It isn’t good news, the dolphins ‘melon’ or forehead breaks the surface first as it blows, then its small dorsal fin comes up and then it plunges back down again”.

“How long does that take?”

“Less than a second”.

“Oh”.

I digested this.

“I don’t think we’re going to see one are we?”

Mark looked depressed. With a sigh he opened a bottle of baiji beer and took a rather complicated swig at it so as not to take his eyes off the water.

“Well, we might well see a finless porpoise” he said.

“They are not as rare as the dolphins are they?” I said.

“Well, they are certainly endangered in the Yangtse. There are thought to be about 400 of them, they are having the same problems here but you would also find them in the coastal waters off china and as far west as Pakistan so they are not in such absolute danger as a species. They can see much better than the baiji which suggests that they are relative newcomers. Look! There’s one, finless porpoise!”

I was just in time to see a shape fall back into the water, then it was gone…

“How did you know it was a finless porpoise?” I asked, quite impressed by this.

“Two things really. First we could actually see it – it came right out of the water, finless porpoises do that – the baiji doesn’t”.[1]

“You mean, if you can actually get to see it, it must be a finless porpoise?”

“Mmm, more or less, yeah”.

“Well, what’s the other reason?”

“Well, it hadn’t got a fin.”

Now, I have been trying to find the footage of the reported sighting but the only thing I could find was this 15 second clip from BBC news. Although I am by no means an expert, the first clip they use, though it is a dolphin and not a finless porpoise (you can tell by the shape of the mouth/nose – look at the above pictures) it doesn’t appear to be from the Yangtse, which is turbid. There were previously baiji in captivity.

The second clip seems to be random people on a boat in the Yangtse with no pictures of the dolphins. The third seems to be from the same thing as the first.

The final one could easily be a finless porpoise. It’s too difficult to tell.

Even if it is a baiji, and even if it is in the Yangtse, and I dearly hope it is. One or two animals does not make a breeding population and the only change in its status is from extinct to about to be extinct.

[1] This is at odds with what Wang Ding was quoted as saying on the BBC – “Wang Ding, also from the Institute of Hydrobiology and a leading authority on the species, said that the sighting could not be confirmed 100% because of the distance, but that it looked and acted like a baiji”

It is also at odds with what the local who spotted the creature said “It was about 1,000 metres away and jumped out of the water several times.”