“We are very glad to see baiji still exist in the world,” Wang was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

The news comes shortly after China’s leading expert on the baiji, Wang Ding, pronounced the species extinct following a fruitless 38-day search of the Yangtze by an international team of scientists.

At the time expedition members said that a few Baiji may still exist in the murky waters of the Yangtze but that the population is no longer viable and any stragglers will die out within a generation. In other words, the reprieve will likely be short-lived.

“We have to accept the fact, that the Baiji is functionally extinct. It is a tragedy, a loss not only for China, but for the entire world,” said August Pfluger, a noted Baiji expert and head of baiji.org, a group that seeks to protect the dolphin.

The Chinese government has said it will try to capture any remaining baiji for a captive breeding program.

The baiji’s demise

The ultimate demise of the Baiji was caused by pollution, overfishing, boat traffic, and obstructions like dams. Unusually, the dolphin’s decline was not tied to direct harvesting by humans.

When the Baiji is officially declared extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature / World Conservation Union (IUCN) — 50 years after its last recorded sighting — it will be first large aquatic mammal to disappear since the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. Chinese rivers still support a population of freshwater cetaceans: the endemic Yangtze Finless Porpoise. However, the Baiji survey found less than 400.

“Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second Baiji”, said Wang Ding, deputy director of the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Science in Wuhan.

“The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. The Yangtze River dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over twenty million years ago. This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasizes that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet,� said Dr Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London and a participant in the six-week search for baiji. “The baiji’s extinction also highlights the need for new conservation initiatives in China’s increasingly threatened Yangtze ecosystem, which is also home to endangered freshwater porpoises, seven-metre long fish, giant salamanders and white Siberian cranes.�

She’s got a sparkle in her eye and a distinctive dolphin grin.

But Winter, the year-old dolphin at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, is missing a very significant part of her anatomy: a tail.

The young bottlenosed dolphin lost her tail and joint when she was caught in a crab trap near Indian River Lagoon, along Florida’s east coast. She was just a baby of three months.

The rope wrapped around her tail and cut off the blood supply. “It looked like paper,” said Dana Zucker, chief operating officer of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. “Bit by bit over the weeks it just fell off.”

The lack of a tail did not slow the bright dolphin down, however. Instead, Winter simply learned how to swim without — using a startling combination of moves that resemble an alligator’s undulating swimming style and a shark’s side-to-side tail swipes.

Though flippers are normally employed for steering and braking, Winter uses them to work up momentum.

Despite her ingenuity, scientists searched for a possible solution to the missing tail - and they may just have found one.

A prosthetic specialist has invented a prosthetic tail for Winter, including a gel sleeve that will not irritate her sensitive skin.

It is the first for a dolphin, and it remains to be seen how successful it will be over the long-term.

In the meantime, however, Winter the tailless dolphin is making history.

Source:http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Undersea explorer Robert Ballard leans back and smiles at the screens arrayed above his desk. One displays a view of a remote operating vessel, another scans along a seafloor never before viewed by humans.

It’s the Black Sea, not far from Ukraine, a region long closed to outsiders and now yielding a treasure trove of Byzantine vessels that met their ends 1,000 or more years ago. For Ballard the archaeologist, those vessels and their contents are a delight. For Ballard the explorer, the modern technology he’s testing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is pretty exciting, too.

Thanks to the massive speed of modern communications, talking to him from a desk in Silver Spring, Md., while he is aboard the research vessel Alliance in the Black Sea is almost as simple as talking to him in person. And that’s the idea.

Ballard is testing a system planned for use aboard NOAA’s new vessel Okeanos Explorer, scheduled to go to sea next year as the first U.S. government vessel dedicated to exploring unknown parts of the ocean.

“It’s mission, literally, is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth,” Ballard said.

“That means that the exploration could encounter a biological discovery, a geological discovery, hopefully for many of us an archaeological discovery. So there is no way of knowing in advance what the discovery is going to be,” he said.

The plan is to have dozens or hundreds of scientists participate without ever having to leave their homes and universities.

The ship will be in high-speed communications with a center at the University of Rhode Island, and from there via Internet2 to universities and science centers across the country, calling on whatever expertise is needed.

Ballard likens it to a hospital emergency room.
“An emergency room has no idea what the ambulance is going to deliver at 3 o’clock Sunday morning,” he explained. “They don’t know if it’s going to be a head injury, a mother having a baby, a heart attack or whatever,” so the hospital has a system for doctors to be on call.

“Now we’re doing the same sort of thing in support of NOAA,” he said.
The center in Rhode Island will operate like the NASA space center in Houston, which is constantly in contact with the astronauts in outer space, just as Rhode Island will be with the aquanauts in inner space.

Above Ballard’s head, the underwater camera continues to move across the seafloor, passing mainly stones and sand and, suddenly, a series of straight lines and right angles.

Those most likely mark a wreck, the remains of some ancient vessel the explorers will turn and scan again.

Unlike other oceans, the deepest parts of the Black Sea contain no dissolved oxygen, so there are no sea worms to devour the wood of ancient vessels.

Off the coast of Turkey, Ballard said he has found a sunken Byzantine vessel so complete that even the 1,000-year-old masts still rise upward. Wreck sites are littered with containers once used for wine, oil, honey and other trade goods.

That’s the kind of thing he looks for, underwater archaeology.

But what if he finds some unknown new creature, or strange bit of geology beneath the sea?

That’s where the new communication system comes in.

“Scientifically, some of the remote expeditions would have benefited by having more experts on board and this is a way to get more experts,” said Steve Gittings, scientific coordinator for NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary Program.

For example, he said, when researchers discovered hot-water vents deep in the ocean they had to mount additional trips to bring in experts to study the surprising worms and other life that existed in total darkness around the vents.

Now, with high speed communications, researchers would be called in to study high-definition images in real time.

Also, Gittings said, the system will be beneficial for education programs.

In the past, educational efforts were mounted after scientists returned, perhaps months after they completed a voyage. With the new system, students and teachers will be able to watch research as it happens.

Source:http://www.examiner.com