Safe havens offer hope for Yangtze River dolphins
Print Edition
UNIVERSITY Professor Yu Daoping knows the ins and outs of the Yangtze River dolphin, having dissected more than 200 corpses of the finless porpoise over the past 20 years.
When not teaching, Yu works as chief consultant at the newly opened Xijiang River Finless Porpoise Rescue Center in Anqing City, east China’s Anhui Province, tracking the cause of death among the 25-million-year-old species.
“Dead dolphins salvaged from the Yangtze had no food in their stomachs, and scars from wounds covered their bodies,” he said of a recent find.
Starvation and boat motors are the biggest threat to the endangered species, he said.
The Anqing Fishery Bureau recently transported five wounded porpoises to the Xijiang River, a 10-kilometer section of the Yangtze, and helped establish the rescue center.
As the Yangtze, the longest river in China, has been turned into a busy shipping waterway and a hydrological power source for hundreds of reservoirs, animal activists have warned that the finless porpoises might die out within 10 to 15 years, if tough steps are not taken.
There are only about 1,040 finless porpoises in the Yangtze and two lakes linked to it, according to a 2012 survey by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and World Wildlife Fund.
However, they are considered “functionally extinct,” because water dams and shipping have restricted their movement and the population is too small for the species to reproduce.
Jiang Zeqiu, an official with the Anqing Fishery Bureau, said the city authority hoped to turn Xijiang River into a haven for the dolphins.
However, the government-funded rescue center is facing an uncertain future.
The center, which has teamed up with the Research Institute of Freshwater Ecology of the Anqing Normal Institute to carry out protection work, is not yet a formal government establishment, with steady financing and staff. Just two people provided by the fishery bureau manage its work.
Similar rescue centers have also been along the Yangtze in the cities of Zhenjiang and Nanjiang in east China’s Jiangsu Province, and in Yueyang, Hunan Province.
On October 14, the Ministry of Agriculture issued a Yangtze finless porpoise protection notice urging local authorities to implement the most restrictive protection measures possible.
Rescuers will move dolphins to safe havens whenever they are found in the wild, it said.
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