Nature
September 29, 2000

The world’s most endangered cetacean, the Chinese ‘baiji’ river dolphin, may finally have a chance of being saved from extinction. But it could be too late; researchers who carried out a nine-day search for the dolphins didn’t find a single one.

The world’s most critically endangered cetacean, the Chinese ‘baiji’ river dolphin, may finally have a chance of being saved from extinction. But it could be too late; researchers who carried out a nine-day pilot search for the dolphins last month didn’t find a single one. The freshwater baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) once thrived in their only habitat, the Yangtze River, which runs though central China. But fewer than 100 dolphins are thought to be left in the river, which has become a busy, polluted highway. "If the giant panda is China’s symbol of the destruction of forests, the baiji stands for polluted waters," says Wang Ding, from the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology. An international team of scientists, led by Ding, is hoping to catch the animals and release them in a safer place, possibly the Shishou reserve, which is a 20-kilometre arm off the Yangtze.