Baiji

The **baiji** (*Lipotes vexillifer*) was a species of river dolphin endemic to the Yangtze River in China. Known as the "Goddess of the Yangtze" in China, this animal was also known as the **Yangtze River dolphin**, the **Chinese river dolphin**, **whitefin dolphin** and **Yangtze dolphin**.

The baiji first appeared 25 million years ago, and subsequently migrated to the Yangtze River. The last confirmed sighting of the dolphin dates to 2004 and following an unsuccessful expedition in 2006, the baiji was declared extinct.

## Anatomy and morphology

Baiji were thought to breed in the first half of the year, the peak calving season being from February to April.

## Distribution

Originally, it was believed that the Chinese River Dolphin was confined to Dongting Lake, until it was recognized in the 1970s that it travels over a length of 1600 kilometers from the mouth of the Yangtze River upwards to about the height of Yichang and in the neighboring eastern Chinese river Qiantang. was to be found. About every four kilometers a river dolphin could be found. At high tide, the animals also penetrated into tributaries of the river and lakes. It disappeared from Dongting Lake after very large amounts of sediment had accumulated in the water due to agriculture. After that, it was only sighted in the wide, slow-flowing middle part of the Yangtze River.

## Evolutionary history

According to paleontologists through fossil research, baiji dolphins have appeared in the Yangtze River basin in the Miocene and Pliocene of the Tertiary period. In September 1981, Chinese geologists discovered a fragment of a fossilized mandible in Guiping, Guangxi. This fossilized mandible belongs to an ancient baiji dolphin called *Parapontoporia*. Fossils record the ancient traits of the original baiji dolphin about 9 million years ago, with little change compared to today's baiji dolphin. The baiji still retains many of the skeletal positions of the original baiji dolphin. The slow evolution of the baiji dolphin may be due to the lack of competition for survival or environmental changes in the past, thus retaining the ancient shape of its ancestors, so it is called "living fossil" and "giant panda in the water" If it weren't for great ecological change, it wouldn't have gone extinct.

## Conservation

As soon as China decided to modernize, it recognized the precarious state of the river dolphin. In 1978 the Chinese Academy of Sciences established the Freshwater Dolphin Research Center, as a branch of the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology. However, the efforts of this institute to save these mammals proved to be few and late.

China's first aquatic species protection organization, the Wuhan Conservation Foundation "Baiji Dolphin", was founded in December 1996. It raised 1,383,924.35 yuan (about $100,000) and used those funds for in *vitro* cell preservation and to maintain Chinese river dolphin facilities, including Shishou Shrine that was flooded in 1998.

Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine documented their encounters with endangered animals on their conservation trips for the BBC's *Last Chance to See*. The book of the same name, published in 1990, included photos of a captive specimen, a male named Qi Qi, who lived in the dolphinarium of the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology from 1980 until July 14, 2002. This dolphin, discovered by a fisherman in Dongting Lake, became the sole resident of the Baiji dolphinarium, next to East Lake. Another captured dolphin died after a year (from 1996 to 1997), in the Shishou Tian-e-Zhou Semi-Natural Reserve, which contained only finless porpoises (*Neophocaena phocaenoides*) since 1990. Another dolphin, a female found on Chongming Island near Shanghai in 1998, died of starvation after a month after not accepting the food provided.

The most endangered cetacean species in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records, was last sighted in September 2004. Xinhua News Agency announced on December 4, 2006 that no Chinese river dolphins were detected after a visual and acoustic search conducted by 30 researchers for six weeks in the Yangtze River. The failure of the "Yangtze River freshwater dolphin expedition" raised suspicions about the unequivocal extinction of a cetacean species due to human action (the extinction of some right whale populations may or may not have been distinctive species). Poor visibility of the water and weather conditions may have made sightings difficult, but some scientists still declared the species "functionally extinct" on December 13, 2006. The current population of this dolphin is difficult to calculate, but it is thought that they are less than those needed for the propagation of the species.

### Timeline

* 1979: China declares it endangered.
* 1983: Dolphin hunting is declared illegal.
* 1986: 300 individuals remain.
* 1989: Gezhouba Dam is completed.
* 1990: 200 individuals remain.
* 1994: Construction begins on the Three Gorges Dam.
* 2006: No individuals are found, indicating that they are "most likely extinct".
* 2007: An expedition is made along the river to find out how many animals remain. No animal is found, so the species is declared completely extinct. From here the Chinese government will try to prevent the extinction of the finless porpoise, another cetacean that also lives in the river and is in serious danger of extinction. However, that year a baiji was sighted by a neighbor of the Chinese province Anhui.
* 2007: Fewer than 50 copies remain (only 23 counted).
* 2010: The dam begins to fill.
* 2013: Only 7 specimens are found.