Chinese River Dolphin declared extinct

[GenuineRisk]

Depressing news from China. You think they'd have learned something from watching the US trash our own environment duriing the first half of the last century, but not so much...

| BEIJING The "goddess of the Yangtze", a freshwater dolphin
unique to the Chinese river, is extinct. The baiji, above, is the first big
mammal to disappear as a result of Man's destruction of its habitat and the
first cetacean, or member of the whale family, to die out.
| The long-beaked mammals had swum in the Yangtze for 20 million
years and could be seen in their hundreds until the 1980s. Not one was
sighted during a six-week expedition. August Pfluger, its Swiss
conservationist leader, said: "We have to accept that the baiji is
functionally extinct. We have lost the race."
| The UN environment programme has declared the Yangtze a dead
zone, its water lacking sufficient oxygen to support fish.