Nick Conger is former editor of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) blog, On Balance. This article was adapted from his post Conserving Life Along the Yangtze. Conger contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
In late 2006, researchers from the Institute of Hydrobiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, China returned from a six-week journey on the Yangtze River, dejected.
They had searched far and wide for signs of the baji — commonly known as the "Goddess of the Yangtze," China's famed river dolphin — and came up empty. Months later the freshwater species was declared functionally extinct.
Posts
