Hidden gems

fatalities in the 1970s and 80s were due to fishing equipment. It is not that these threats went unrecognised. Aside from a brief spell during Mao’s Great Leap Forward — when Nature was declared an ‘enemy of the people’ and the Baiji was actively prosecuted — the urgent need for its conservation was gradually realised inside and outside of China. But, while some attempts were made to establish a captive population, the Baiji’s demise could not be halted in the face of the exorbitant economic growth: the last Baiji sighting was in 2002 and in the same year the last captive animal died. The Baiji was one of five species of river dolphin: the Boto, or Amazon river dolphin, the Fanciscana, living on the La Plata estuaries in Argentina, as well as the closely related Susu and the Bhulan of the Ganges and Indus rivers, respectively. They all show a number of convergent evolutionary adaptations, most notably their poor eyesight, verging on complete blindness in some of them. As similar as their biology are the threats they face from habitat destruction, increased water use and fishery. In particular, the Ganges and Indus rivers dolphins are in immediate danger. Like the Baiji, they are ‘living fossils’ and the only representatives of a once successful mammalian family. Their estimated numbers each range between 1,000 and 2,000 individuals and are predicted to be dwindling, as they share their habitats with a dense and ever-increasing human population for which water is as vital as it is for them. Whether the Baiji is now being classified as ‘possibly’ or ‘functionally’ extinct, whether or not there will be future headlines of the odd Baiji sighting, it has by now almost entered a realm of the unreal, of the mythical — not much different from that of the pretty girl whose incarnation it was fabled to be. Ironically, knowing next to nothing about how the Baiji lived, we are not far away from the ignorance of the fishermen who created the myth, except that they treated the ‘Goddess of the Yangtze’ with respect. Hidden gems