Baiji Doesn't Live Here Anymore

If you think it’s tough to find a meaningful relationship these days, consider poor Lipotes vexillifer, commonly known as the Yangtze River Dolphin, or Baiji. Perhaps “commonly known” is not the best way to put it since Lipotes vexillifer is functionally extinct. Functionally extinct is like in one of those science fiction stories when the sun is about to go nova and all life is going to be obliterated and there’s nothing anybody can do about it, but everybody is still standing around reflecting on the irony of humanity while trying to make amends for past transgressions and wishing they had followed their dreams instead of going into corporate accounting, except that there are only a precious few Yangtze River Dolphins remaining and they probably don’t find much irony in humanity. Actually there has been no confirmed sighting of the Baiji since 2007, so they may already be history, but whether there remains one or one-hundred; the sun has clearly set, if not exploded, on their twenty million year reign.

Dolphins are generally considered to be among the biosphere’s more intelligent citizens, but these particular dolphins had the fatally poor judgment to take up residence in the largest river in China. In defense of the Baiji’s wisdom, there was no China, and no humans, twenty million years ago, but, currently, almost one-eighth of the world’s population resides within the Yangtze River’s watershed. Of course, there is no way the Baiji could have anticipated this horrifying turn of events, but all this time evolving in the formerly pristine, fresh waters of the Yangtze has made it impossible for the Baiji to retreat to the relative safety of the ocean; hence, hasta la vista. Wikipedia says that “a traditional Chinese story describes the Baiji as the reincarnation of a princess who had been drowned by her family after refusing to marry a man she did not love”, but it will ultimately prove to be more a case of being drowned in a fishing net by men who were in love with themselves.

Yangtze River Dolphins typically only birth one calf, usually every other year, so you cannot say they reproduce prolifically. With a life span in the wild of around 24 years, the female Baiji reaches sexual maturity at about six years, so if she lives a normal life span and hooks up regularly, she will birth around nine children (compare this to about 850 for a rat and about 2.5 for a human). Unfortunately the attrition rate from the aforementioned fishing nets and the habitat destruction and prey eradication caused by pollution, dredging and damns, and the increasingly hazardous boat traffic and noise pollution which renders the dolphin’s sonar useless, have outpaced the Baiji’s ability to reproduce and resulted in the irreversible decline of the species. It appears that the Yangtze River Dolphin, like all other dolphins, spends its life mostly swimming around and eating fish. It often cooperates with others of its kind to hunt and it spends an inordinate amount of time just goofing off; it is clearly capable of complex communication and learning, but we humans do not really know the extent to which there is a transmitted dolphin “culture” or whether dolphins are truly self-aware in the same neurotic way humans are, so we don’t know if they know they are alone and doomed and that we have made them so.

I’m not going to bash our fine Chinese friends about all this; after all, they have blessed us with the Cultural Revolution and forced sterilization, and virtually every piece of consumer electronics we have bought in the past decade, but I do wonder why the world’s aspiring powers tend to only imitate the bad parts of the American character. The ironically named People’s Republic has largely abandoned socialism for predatory capitalism replete with industrial pollution and exploitation of the proletariat without so much as lip service to freedom of conscience, or even the practical, egalitarian wisdom of Confucius. The loss of the Yangtze River Dolphin is just another material input into the Long March to Chinese economic hegemony and the transformation of the Chinese people into almond-eyed clones of their obese, self-indulgent and obtuse American role models. Maybe it wasn’t habitat destruction after all; maybe the Baiji just died of shame.