Just found this one out in my online wanderings. The Chinese Baiji, a freshwater dolphin appears to be extinct or in so low of numbers that they will be shortly.
They had been trying to save that species, but it appears to have been a failure. The Yangtze River is just too busy for the dolphins to survive.
Apparently it wasn’t just toxins in the water, which they say weren’t at a sufficiently hazardous level to have caused this extinction. It appears instead to be more related to the amount of traffic on the river, which made it difficult for the dolphins to use their sonar.
I know in the coming years reports of various species going extinct will become more and more common. That’s just how the world today is and little can be done for it. However we can work to slow these things down and save many species.
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