In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series, the dolphins disappear suddenly from the earth leaving only a cryptic message: “So long, and thanks for all of the fish.” Should Qi Qi, one of the last ever Yangtze river dolphins, have been able to leave a message before his sad death after decades of life in a sterile, small concrete tank, it might well have been a variant of that: “So long, and thanks for nothing.”*

For this dolphin species, indeed this whole mammalian family, the Lipotidae, which has existed for around 21.5 million years, is now extinct. The story of how that was allowed to happen is told by the British conservation biologist Samuel Turvey, in Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin.

It is a story from which almost no one, except Turvey himself, and a handful of other individuals, emerges well. No one knows, and no one probably will ever now know, exactly what killed the baiji (its Chinese name. It’s scientific name is Lipotes vexilifer). It might have been the hideous pollution of the river, it might have been the illegal and vicious fishing methods in regular use, it might have been the river’s use as a major transport highway that made it a cacophonous obstacle course of deadly propellers: probably it was a combination of all of these things.

The Chinese government was culpable, certainly. It never made any serious effort not only to address these issues (which clearly would be a mammoth undertaking), but also failed to develop a safe refuge area in which the species might have been preserved. Yet this, as Turvey shows, is a developing world government in a country with no tradition at all of conservation, so that is perhaps understandable, if not excusable.

But clearly on this account even greater opprobrium should be laid at the feet of the international conservation organisations and prominent experts, which might have been expected to throw every conceivable resource at preserving this beautiful, charismatic, important species. Instead, Turvey finds, they are handicapped by a fear of failure, by an unpractical ideology, by a simple failure to face the facts.

That ideology comes down to a persistent belief that species should be preserved by preserving their habitat, not captive breeding programmes. Of course that’s a fine ideal, but clearly also sometimes — particularly in developing countries, and increasingly in a climate-changed world — is going to be impossible.

Turvey, in partnership with one other individual, Leigh Barrett, wrenched together enough money to create the starting point for what might have been a captive breeding programme. But sadly, when the careful scientific survey that they arranged was carried out in 2007, there were no baiji left.

Now, the only real memory of the baiji, what will give it a faint, ghostlike existence, is this book, which tells as much as will ever be known of its complete story: how the Chinese traditionally regarded it as a tragic maiden transformed into this beautiful, graceful creature, revered as a goddess; how ancient writers reported how it was used by boat people as a warning of danger; and how it was brought to scientific recognition by a 17-year-old son of a missionary (inevitably pictured here with one he shot). You might consider it one very small stroke of luck for the species that it has such a fine euologist – a scientific expert who writes with passion and style.
read more »