Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 30, 2006

Worrying About Mekong River Dolphins

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They’ve been described as the rabbits of the sea. I’m referring to minke whales.

How much money does Greenpeace spend sending boats to the Antarctic to ‘save’ them?

I’m more concerned about the species that are really threatened with extinction like the freshwater dolphins of Asia.

After posting earlier today on the baniji in China, I was sent a link to the Mekong Dolphin Conservation Project.

dolphin_out_of_water.jpg
[from the Mekong Dolphin Conservation Project website]

This project to save the Mekong River Dolphins appears to have been initiated by one dedicated PhD Student, Isabel Beasley.

I wonder how her budget compares to the Greenpeace budget for minke whales?

Where are our priorities?

Polling the State of the Environment

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Greenpeace tell us we should worry about global warming and GM food. But what are most people worried about when it comes to the environment?

There is currently a poll on ‘The Environment’ at the ‘What the People Want’ . If you fill it in and leave your email address Graham Young will send you a summary of his findings.

The poll is structured along the lines of work done by Riley Dunlap in the early 1990s. He asked people how the environment was locally, nationally and globally and found everyone thought the environment was worse ‘elsewhere’. Even in the one country most respondents believed the environment was worse ‘elsewhere’.

In his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg suggested this is because our fears for the environment are to a high degree communicated by scientists, conservationists and the media.

A Note on Energy & Adaptation: Steven Hayward

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“In the end, a relentless campaign to extend political control over the world’s energy use is likely to fail, in part because, even if severe climate change is in our future, most people intuitively recognize that rhetoric about “the end of civilization as we know it” is inconsistent with human experience. Our distant ancestors survived an ice age with little more than animal skins, crude tools, and open fire pits. For all the talk of science and progress, the global-warming alarmists betray an astonishing lack of confidence in human creativity and resiliency. It’s almost as if the scientific community had abandoned the idea of evolution.”

Steven Hayward, American Enterprise Institute

Worrying About the Baiji

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I was a little confused by a recent article at ABC Online about the Baiji, the rare river dolphins in the Yangtze River in China.

I was confused because the news article titled ‘Plan hatched to save Yangtze dolphins’ suggested the dolphin would be saved because they could be relocated to a nearby lake. But this is not a new plan, I understood from the IUCN that a reserve was created for the dolphins back in 1992, but conservationists had been unsuccessful at moving individual animals.

Is this a new initiative? Since about 2004 the baiji.org Foundation has been working for the conservation of the river dolphins.

chinese_dolphin.jpg
[picture from CITES]

The banji (Lipotes vexillifer) is considered the most endangered of all the worlds dophins, porpoises and whales and it is thought to only occur in China’s heavily polluted Yangtze River. There are two other closely related river dolphins one in the Indus (Platanista gangetica minor) and one in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna and Karnaphuli-Sangu (Platanista gangetica gangetica), and also freshwater populations of Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) in the Mekong, Mahakam, and Irrawaddy Rivers, and populations in the brackish waters of Sonkhla (Thailand) and Chilka (India) lakes.

Update 4.30 pm

It seems the story at ABC Online was a summary of a story at the BBC Online which ends with comment that:

“The plan is to set up a reserve in an oxbow lake 21km long which was part of the Yangtze until the 1970s.”

Tian-e-Zhou lake already houses another freshwater cetacean, the Yangtze finless porpoise, so conditions are likely to suit the baiji.

There are fish in the lake to provide food for the dolphins; and although there may be some human fishing, it is likely to be on a much smaller scale than in the Yangtze itself.

…Costs could amount to between £200,000 and £300,000 ($365,000 and $545,000) for the first year’s operations.

Boats are needed to catch the dolphins, helicopters to transfer them to Tian-e-Zhou. Holding pens need to be constructed, veterinary staff provided, and an inventory made of fish stocks.

The rescue plan speaks of conducting five dolphin capture operations in the Yangtze within the next three years “…in order to establish a viable ex-situ breeding population of baiji at Tian-e-Zhou before the Yangtze population undergoes a further decline or becomes extinct”.

The long-term plan would be to re-introduce them to the Yangtze, but only when the prospects of them thriving there have risen.”

And I’ve just been emailed an article from Nature Vol 44 0/27 (April 2006) which states that during a nine day pilot search for the dolphins in March not a single dolphin was found. The same article talks about catching and releasing the dolphins into the Shishou reserve. There will be another ‘survey’ along the river in November.

So we have a species right on the verge of extinction and the IUCN came out just a month or two ago banging on about polar bears and global warming. Where are our priorities?