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BEIJING: When the last white-fin dolphin, or baiji, died, so too did a piece of China's soul.
This peaceful mammal was known as the Goddess of the Yangtze and for millions of years, she ruled the waters of China's longest river.
But breakneck development, over-fishing and a massive
increase in shipping traffic led to the animal's extinction within a few short years.
The almost-blind, long beaked animal, one of the oldest mammals on the planet at around 20 million years old, now officially becomes the first big aquatic mammal to disappear since hunters killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.
Measuring up to 8'2" in length, the baiji is, or at least was, a relative of other freshwater dolphins found in the Mekong, Indus, Ganges and Amazon rivers.
Local legend has it that the baiji is the reincarnation of a princess who refused to marry a man she did not love and was drowned by her father for shaming the family.
The baiji had no natural predators, except for man.
The white-fin dolphin shared its habitat on the rushing waters of the Yangtze with huge river cruise ships, tugboats and fishing boats.
Too often, the almost-blind beasts crashed into ship's propellers, as fishing boats played havoc with the sonar systems they used to chart their course along the river.
Fishermen using explosives or catching them in their nets illegally also devastated the baiji population.
The lack of oxygen in the Yangtze due to breakneck industrialisation contributed to the mammal's demise.
Despite a growing list of adversities, there were still 400 white-fin dolphins or lipotes vexillifer alive during the 1980's, but that number dropped significantly, and alarmingly, to less than 150 in the last decade.
A survey in 1997 listed just 13 sightings, with the last confirmed sighting in 2004.
The final baiji in captivity, Qi Qi, died in2002.
It was declared "functionally extinct" after an expedition last year.
To understand how devastating the extinction of the white-fin dolphin, you need to understand the importance of the Yangtze river to the Chinese national psyche.
The Chinese call it simply chang jiang, or long river, and as well as having a huge symbolic value, it is an essential shipping route, is economically vital to a whole region and also waters one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
The Yangtze runs 6,300 kilometres through nine provinces from western China's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to the East China Sea.
Yangtze is mostly a name used by foreigners to describe it.
Recent reports have shown that nearly 30 per cent of the river's major tributaries, including the Minjiang, Tuojiang, Xiangjiang and Huangpu rivers, are now seriously polluted.
Mindful of the white-fin dolphin's crucial symbolic importance, and keen to replicate its success at breeding endangered species that it had with giant pandas, the Chinese government set up a reserve in a lake in central Hubei province to look after baiji in capitivity.
But they were too late - there were no dolphins left to start an artificial propagation programme.
The extinction of the white-fin dolphin is not the end of the story.
China's other indigenous cetaceans are in trouble, facing threats from pollution and expansion.
The expedition that searched for the baiji also exposed the threat to other species.
They spotted about 300 of another endangered freshwater mammal, the Yangtze finless porpoise, far fewer than expected.
The mammal lived only in the Yangtze and was described by marine biologists as a living fossil because it remained essentially unchanged over the 20 million years since it first entered the river.
The river regularly bursts its banks and floods the surrounding areas with spectacular results - one of the main reasons for building the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest water storage facility, was to regulate the river's level.
The flooding is liable to get worse, according to some experts.
And now there is no longer a Goddess of the River to bring good luck to the currents of the Yangtze.
- INDEPENDENT
