Last week came the news that the Yangtze river dolphin is now extinct:
Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), one of the paper’s co-authors, described the findings as a “shocking tragedy”.
“The Yangtze river dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over 20 million years ago,” Dr Turvey explained.
“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.”
The species (Lipotes vexillifer) was the only remaining member of the Lipotidae, an ancient mammal family that is understood to have separated from other marine mammals, including whales, dolphins and porpoises, about 40-20 million years ago.
The white, freshwater dolphin had a long, narrow beak and low dorsal fin; lived in groups of three or four and fed on fish.
While this sad news got a lot of media attention, the likely extinction of another large Yangtze river species got a lot less, perhaps because it was a fish and not a mammal:
Wei is one of China’s foremost experts on the Chinese paddlefish, a leviathan that reportedly can grow 23 feet (7 meters) long and weigh half a ton.
But the odds of finding even a single one of the aquatic giants may be steadily diminishing.
No adult Chinese paddlefish have been caught in the Yangtze River by fishers since 2003. Even more worrisome, no young paddlefish have been seen since 1995.
Unfortunately, the extinction of these two species is just a small part of the mass extinction process taking place right now all over the world. Most species that disappear do not get any media attention; in fact, of many species of plants and animals that disappear we didn’t even know they existed, having disappeared before we got to know them, killed through the destruction of their habitat in places like the Amazon river basin, or on Borneo, as the video below makes clear.
Now we hear a lot about global warming as the big environmental threat du jour, but that is just part of the problem. Even if it didn’t exist, just the ongoing destruction of habitats worldwide, through deforestation, pollution, desertification and such, would ensure the extinctions will go on. We therefore need to look at the big picture, not just at climate change, but at the whole way in which we as a species manage our environment and our impact on it.
Adhoc measures and cheap technological fixes are not enough to help us get out of this mess. Take as example the idea to reduce the use of fossil fuels in cars –a big source of carbondioxide emissions– with socalled biodiesels, which use palm oil as an important ingredient. It seems a good idea, to use a natural replacement for oil, but because of growing demand for palm oil as a fuel, but it’s already causing increased deforestation and wetland destruction in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, which in turn also causes increased carbondioxide emissions there…
We’re living in an interconnected world — time we start behaving like it.