'Extinct' dolphin spotted in Yangtze

Aug 30, 2007, 6:11 GMT

Shanghai - A baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin, has been spotted in the Chinese river, days after a top scientist had said the freshwater mammal was probably extinct, Chinese media reported.

A local man saw 'a big white animal' August 19 in the Yangtze at Tongling in the eastern province of Anhui and filmed it with a digital camera. Experts shown the footage then confirmed it was one of the long-nosed, nearly blind dolphins, one of the 12 most endangered species in the world.

'Many people have believed that the baiji is extinct, and this finding brings us a sliver of hope,' Wang Ding, a leading expert on the species from the hydrobiology institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the official Xinhua news agency.

He added, however, that it would remain difficult to save the animal only found in the Yangtze River.

Their numbers are few so the possibility of them mating is small, he said, adding that they were doomed to go extinct unless conservationists hunted for survivors and brought them together in one section of the river for breeding.

The news of the sighting came after a team of 25 scientists from China, the United States and Europe led by Wang failed to find a single baiji on a more than a five-week search last year. The result led Wang to say this month that the baiji, also known as the Goddess of the Yangtze, was probably extinct.

'I never saw such a big thing in the water before, so I filmed it,' Zeng Yujiang, the man who spotted the dolphin, told Xinhua. 'It was about 1,000 metres away and jumped out of the water several times.'

Thousands of Yangtze River dolphins swam in China's longest river in the 1950s, but their numbers were decimated by pollution, overfishing and heavy river traffic. By 1997, researchers found 13 in the river, where the last previous sighting of a baiji, which have no natural enemies, was in 2004. The last captive baiji died in 2002.

If the baiji does die out, it would be the first recorded extinction of a cetacean attributed to human action.

Wang said he is planning a trip to Tongling to search for the baiji.