Way to go China (News).

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by Telegraph

Yangtzse River dolphin (Baiji) 'now extinct'

The Yangtze River dolphin enjoys a rare and depressing distinction, according to new research.

The grey white, long-beaked animal is the world's first cetacean -the order of whales, dolphins and porpoises -to be made extinct by man, concludes an international team that has conducted comprehensive surveys of its habitat.

Yangtzse River dolphin: 'The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy'
The demise of the near-blind mammal also represents the first extinction of a large vertebrate (backboned animal) for more than 50 years, since overhunting claimed the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. A zoologist said it was a "shocking tragedy."

The paper, lead-authored by Dr Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), is published in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters and blames its extinction on a degraded habitat in the Yangtze waters of eastern China.

With little need to see in the shallow, turbid Yangtze waters, the dolphin - for centuries called the Goddess of the Yangtze and the subject of myth and legend - evolved a highly effective sonar above its beak.

But the roar of marine traffic along one of China's premier waterways effectively blinded it. Ships and tourist boats sucked them into their propellers, pollution poisoned their river home and, most of all, they suffered because of overfishing.

In the 1950s several thousand baiji, as the dolphins are known in Chinese, were thought to swim in the Yangtze. The last authenticated record was in 2001. By the end of 2006, an expedition by the team triggered reports that the creature was functionally extinct, suggesting only one or two individuals at most survived. Now the team concludes it is probably extinct.

Dr Turvey said: "The primary factor responsible for the baiji's extinction was probably unsustainable by-catch in uncontrolled and unselective local fisheries, which use rolling hook long lines, nets and electro-fishing.

"Relatively little information remains available on causes of baiji mortality, but between 40-50 per cent of all known baiji deaths over the past few decades were caused by fishing gear. "

"The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. The Yangtze River dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over 20m years ago.

"This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet."

At the Hydrobiology Institute in Wuhan, the story of the stuffed, enamelled body of Qi-Qi, the most famous Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) to have lived in captivity tells how the march of modernisation transformed the dolphin's river home in silty waters into its graveyard.

The dolphin was found badly bruised, the victim of illegal fishing, in 1980. A female was introduced to his enclosure once but she died before she was old enough to reproduce.

"This wasn't the only Yangtze dolphin kept in captivity - there were actually several over the years," said Dr Turvey. "However, Qi-Qi lived for over 22 years, was the last surviving captive baiji, and became the most famous baiji individual.

Dr Turvey added, "The baiji's extinction also highlights the need for new conservation initiatives in China's increasingly threatened Yangtze ecosystem, which is also home to endangered freshwater porpoises, seven-metre long fish, giant salamanders and white Siberian cranes."

Scientists and environmentalists are now focusing on saving its cousin, the finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides). About 2,700 porpoises lived along the Yangtze in 1991 but the population is now "rapidly declining," he said.

Source.

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Asian cultural taste prominently features fish as a staple of diet, and humans are quickly emptying the oceans of its reserves of fish since they eat so many before they're able to replenish themselves to an acceptable level (which would take years, and people don't want to wait that long). Imagine this - fish and crustacean are smaller in size than twenty years ago because people ate all the large sea creatures and left only the small ones to reproduce. As the Asian population grew larger, demand for fish increased and supplies dwindled because people had to catch more to meet the demand. It's a down-ward spiral.

Not to mention China's blatant disregard for environmental health in the name of efficiency. I've done research on the China in the past and I know full well that while she feigns concern about her ecology, she really don't care about it and only says stuff to placate the European Union.

[Talon87]

I don't want to repeat myself, so ... http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/showthread.php?t=16369 for my thoughts on this matter

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by Xuande

I don't want to repeat myself...

I can see why - not sure how you could hold a civil conversation with those folks, though. =_=

...

What want to know is, why didn't people take a DNA sample for the Baiji so we could archive it? Four years ago I heard the story of a great old tree in Pennsylvania or something that had to be cut down for a cancerous growth, and some scientists took cell samples are were planning on cloning the tree back into existance. Sure, it wouldn't be the SAME tree, but at in some hundred years a new big tree could take its spot. We should have some sort of index for animal species just in case they get extinct and accumulate data to condition them back to nature.

[Lunar Delta]

You're completely incorrect. You cannot possibly rationally compare natural evolutionary forces to man's utterly destructive influence on the ecosystem.

Also, you're a big believer in free will? Lol.

[Talon87]

They probably did and the media is making a big, ignorant stink about the whole affair.

I know that when I visted England in 1998, back when cloning was still relatively new, there was a story on the television about how British geneticists had successfully cloned the Major Oak, i.e. the haunt of Robin Hood and his Merry Men in Sherwood Forest, Nottingham, and that the the tiny little seedlings were growing pretty well. The successful clone rate back then was less than 1% ... and it hasn't really improved much (the Dolly method of cloning has a number of obstacles that will need to be overcome before we can expect better numbers), but unlike with animals or humans, nobody really cries over "aborting" crappy seedlings or "making freak saplings suffer" before they expire from this world, so ... yeah. Afaik, the project was unhindered, and there should be a significant number of Major Oak clones in Britain today, probably growing in some private garden in Nottingham. They'd be about 9 years old now ... which is plenty of time for an oak tree to reach a good size.

So yeah, your hunch is not only valid, but shown ... scientists have begun to collect DNA samples from all manner of endangered and newly-extinct animals and have already begun the cloning process for some of the world's most famous plants and animals. I really can't believe that Chinese officials would be so incompetent as to not have collected a blood sample by now (from, say, the mid-1990s when cloning first got underway and the baiji could still be located), but whatever.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

You're completely incorrect. You cannot possibly rationally compare natural evolutionary forces to man's utterly destructive influence on the ecosystem.

I strongly believe that humans are "a cog in the machine" when it comes to Mother Nature. It greatly annoys me when people insist that humans are "separate from Nature" or that their actions are "so destructive as to be unNatural." No. No, no, NO. -_-; However destructive we may be, our destructive power is definitionally part of Nature's scheme. In other words ... "humans killing the planet" is an illusion; the reality is "Mother Nature is committing suicide." Capiche?

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

Also, you're a big believer in free will? Lol.

I'm a believer in the physiochemical "fate" of our brains but I define "free will" as the statistics behind chemistry. In other words ... for any chemical reaction, there are two paths minimum which the reaction may take, A or B. 99% of the time, a particularly solid reaction may go down path A, but there is always that 1% of the time where it goes down path B. I would call this Natural randomness in the human brain "free will", "the power to choose," or (if you will) "the inability of a perfect machine to call how a human is going to react 100% of the time as the number of observations of that human's behavior approaches infinity."

You know I believe that the brain is a physiochemical construct. To do so is to require a highly modified view of "free will."

[Lunar Delta]

I strongly believe that humans are "a cog in the machine" when it comes to Mother Nature. It greatly annoys me when people insist that humans are "separate from Nature" or that their actions are "so destructive as to be unNatural." No. No, no, NO. -_-; However destructive we may be, our destructive power is definitionally part of Nature's scheme. In other words ... "humans killing the planet" is an illusion; the reality is "Mother Nature is committing suicide." Capiche?

No. Normally, the ecosystem changes slowly over time. But now, humans are introducing drastic changes that are impossible to compensate for, at least in the short term.

[Talon87]

No nothing. -_- The "drastic changes" you speak of are still changes done by ... what? Martians? No. Klingons? No. Terran creations of mud and air? Yes. Humans are no different in that they are part of the Nature Machine than Mammoth Cave, a redwood in California, or a tiger in the Cincinnati Zoo. All of our civilization ... all of our knowledge ... all of our skyscrapers and pyramids ... our nuclear power plants and dams and windmills ... all of it is part of Natural Evolution.

If humanity destroys all life on Earth, then it is no more than saying, "Life was destined to fold in upon itself from the beginning, 3 billion years ago." Somebody who appreciates the finality of predetermined, Natural progression should appreciate that much.

To put it into perspective for you ... if there was a rabies virus which infected a dog who had already been infected with Ebola Zaire, and by some freak (but biologically plausible!) accident, the DNA of both virii was incorporated into a new "daughter virus" which displayed the wide-ranging infectious capabilities of rabies and the 90% fatality rate of Ebola ... nobody would say that this was not "Natural." People would say, "Oh, what a horrible disaster this is!", yes, but they would agree that it had happened in the Natural world and was a Natural event. So why is that if a human in the CDC fuses rabies and Ebola, you're going to sit there and tell me, "Mankind eradicated life on Earth, the scumbags -_-" but if the viruses fuse on their own inside a dog, you're not going to get shitty with all of the Canis genus? It's a double-standard, one you need to shake if you want me to seriously believe you are a proponent of "Cause & Event" predestination.

I think your problem is that you (like most people) tend to view evolution as "something which happens to organisms' bodies" and you don't really consider things like knowledge, buildings, or habitat modification to be "evolved traits." You see the Sears Tower or the United Nations building as being something distinctly different from a bat's wings, a dolphin's flippers, or even a robin's nest. You draw a line where no line ought to be drawn, between the pestilence caused by rats and cockroaches who infest our food with disease and feces and who nibble at our bedsheets and curtains vs. the pestilence caused by men who infest the eagle's fish with DDT and who nibble at the panda's bamboo supply. You see it as too much of a "Humans vs. the rest of the planet" scenario, when really, humans aren't any more special (evolutionarily) than Mycobacterium or jellyfish or hyenas -- they simply display (as of yet) the greatest potential for eradicating all life on the planet. That same award has belonged to countless other creatures in the past, and I assure you, it will belong to another animal species once we are long dead and gone.

[Lunar Delta]

So why is that if a human in the CDC fuses rabies and Ebola, you're going to sit there and tell me, "Mankind eradicated life on Earth, the scumbags -_-" but if the viruses fuse on their own inside a dog, you're not going to get shitty with all of the Canis genus?

Yeah, I'd be pretty pissed, because, um, the human did it on purpose? Because it was preventable? Because it didn't have to happen? (Well, theoretically, at least). Honestly, are you even thinking about what you're saying?

That same award has belonged to countless other creatures in the past.

No, it didn't. None of those creatures created nuclear weapons. None of those creatures dumped mercury into the oceans and rivers. None of those creatures were capable of mining away every last resource until there is literally nothing left to mine. Humanity is easily capable of making movies like Soylent Green a painful reality, no other creature that has existed or will exist was/will be capable of such destruction and deprevity.

I have to disagree about humans being a part of nature. It is simply wrong. Dead wrong. Humans are not a part of nature. Humans are against nature and fight it at every turn. The moment we became self aware is the moment we gave nature a big collective middle finger and began doing whatever the hell we wanted.

You see the Sears Tower or the United Nations building as being something distinctly different from a bat's wings, a dolphin's flippers, or even a robin's nest.

No shit. Wings and flippers are biological attributes of said organisms, and nests are something Robins are programmed to build. Humans are not programmed to build sears towers. We found out we could and did it because we wanted to. Because we could. But there is no biological imperative to do such things, no innate mental drive.

As for my belief in determinism... I do believe that it is true, but in my daily life, I pretend it isn't so that I can function. (Or, you could say, I was determined to pretend determinism doesn't exist? Perhaps it doesn't, perhaps randomness is actually true. Which isn't much better, but at least our fates wouldn't be set in stone then.)