A research expedition underway this week on China's mighty but polluted and traffic-choked Yangtze river is racing against time to save one of the earth's rarest dolphins.
The baiji, believed to be among the world's oldest fresh-water mammals, may already be extinct but an international team of scientists and ecologists are hoping against formidable odds that the dolphin has survived.
"We are just hoping the baiji are still here," Brent Stewart, a research biologist from Hubbs-Seaworld Research Institute in San Diego, said aboard the Kekao One, one of the expedition's ships.
Expectations among the experts from China, Japan, Switzerland and the US that the baiji has overcome China's relentless environmental degradation are tempered by gritty reality.
Massive pollution from factories along the banks of the world's third longest river dump brown, foul smelling effluent into the water.
Fisherman, their silhouettes dotting the river's turbid waters, cast lethal kilometer-long nets that result in severe over fishing of the baiji's food source.
The rolling hook fishing nets also inadvertently trap the baiji, while illegal dynamite fishing blows them to bits. Electrofishing stuns them just long enough so they can drown.
Meanwhile, giant barges weighed down with coal, oil, gas and minerals -- among the many key resources China consumes to power its booming economy -- crowd the baiji out of its river home.
August Pfluger, co-expedition chief and head of Swiss-based baiji.org, an environmental group dedicated to saving whales and dolphins, put the baiji's chance of survival at around 5 percent.
China's unprecedented industrialization over the past 30 years has so damaged the Yangtze's ecology that today fewer than 50 baiji are believed to survive, according to researchers on the expedition.
Wang Ding, head of China's Institute of Hydrobiology and one of the world's foremost experts on Yangtze marine life, said the fate of the baiji highlighted China's willingness to sacrifice the environment for economic progress.
"China used to be poor and so it always focused on economic development, while society just didn't care about nature," Wang said.
"Now society has started to realize what has happened. Maybe it is too late but we have to do something otherwise it will be gone for sure," he said.
The objective of the six-week expedition is to find, count and observe the baiji, then capture them and put them in a safer home such as an aquatic reserve.
Aboard the two ships, scientists armed with high-tech optical and acoustic equipment, as well as a group of trained observers, will have scoured 1,750km of the Yangtze when their voyage from Wuhan to Shanghai is complete.
But even the high-tech efforts to monitor the dolphins are being hampered by the frantic economic activity.
The incessant roar of ships' engines drowns out the eerie, melancholic high-pitched whine of the baiji.
"Ships' engine noise sounds like the baiji, so you get noise contamination that can result in missing 50 percent of the sounds," said Tomonari Akamatsu, an underwater bio-acoustics expert from Japan's National Research Institute of Fisheries Engineering.
On a nine-day trip in March researchers failed to find a single baiji, which relies on its highly developed sonar system instead of its eyes.
But with its navigational system impaired by the shipping activity the baiji has become the marine equivalent of road kill -- an animal run over and butchered beneath boat propellers.
One of the other great threats to the dolphin, as well as to its Yangtze cousin, the finless porpoise -- which is set to join the baiji at the end of this year on the list of critically endangered species -- is China's Three Gorges dam, the world's largest.
According to Zhang Xianfeng, director of research at the Institute of Hydrobiology, the dam's massive sluice gates have changed the Yangtze's natural water flows thus impacting biodiversity, probably forever.
The confluence of these factors cut the number of baiji -- identifiable by its long, teeth-filled jaw -- from about 400 in 1984 to fewer than 100 a decade later.
The last time scientists saw the animal in the wild was more than two years ago. The last confirmed count in 1997, done by naked eye, recorded just 13.
Leigh Barrett, one of baiji.org's project managers, described searching for the animal she has never seen alive as a little like "believing in the tooth fairy".
If the goddess of the river, as the baiji is called in ancient Chinese mythology, has vanished, it will mean the loss of a mammalian evolutionary line believed to have begun 25 million years ago -- or about 20 million years before man.
US president-elect Donald Trump continues to make nominations for his Cabinet and US agencies, with most of his picks being staunchly against Beijing. For US ambassador to China, Trump has tapped former US senator David Perdue. This appointment makes it crystal clear that Trump has no intention of letting China continue to steal from the US while infiltrating it in a surreptitious quasi-war, harming world peace and stability. Originally earning a name for himself in the business world, Perdue made his start with Chinese supply chains as a manager for several US firms. He later served as the CEO of Reebok and
Chinese Ministry of National Defense spokesman Wu Qian (吳謙) announced at a news conference that General Miao Hua (苗華) — director of the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission — has been suspended from his duties pending an investigation of serious disciplinary breaches. Miao’s role within the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) affects not only its loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but also ideological control. This reflects the PLA’s complex internal power struggles, as well as its long-existing structural problems. Since its establishment, the PLA has emphasized that “the party commands the gun,” and that the military is
US$18.278 billion is a simple dollar figure; one that’s illustrative of the first Trump administration’s defense commitment to Taiwan. But what does Donald Trump care for money? During President Trump’s first term, the US defense department approved gross sales of “defense articles and services” to Taiwan of over US$18 billion. In September, the US-Taiwan Business Council compared Trump’s figure to the other four presidential administrations since 1993: President Clinton approved a total of US$8.702 billion from 1993 through 2000. President George W. Bush approved US$15.614 billion in eight years. This total would have been significantly greater had Taiwan’s Kuomintang-controlled Legislative Yuan been cooperative. During
US president-elect Donald Trump in an interview with NBC News on Monday said he would “never say” if the US is committed to defending Taiwan against China. Trump said he would “prefer” that China does not attempt to invade Taiwan, and that he has a “very good relationship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Before committing US troops to defending Taiwan he would “have to negotiate things,” he said. This is a departure from the stance of incumbent US President Joe Biden, who on several occasions expressed resolutely that he would commit US troops in the event of a conflict in
RSS