Int'l Freshwater Dolphin Day: Saving finless porpoise (7)

Finless porpoises swim in the Tongling National Nature Reserve for Freshwater Dolphins in Tongling City, east China's Anhui Province, Oct. 22, 2014. Friday coincided with the International Freshwater Dolphin Day. The day set in 2010 for the preservation of the freshwater mammal was also claimed by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as a sad reminder of the recently lost Yangtze white-finned dolphin, known in Chinese as Baiji Dolphin, which is bigger than the finless porpoise. As the Yangtze, the longest river in China, has been turned into a busy shipping waterway and a hydrological power source for hundreds of reservoirs, animal activists warned the finless porpoises may die out within 10 to 15 years, if tough measures are not taken. There are only about 1,040 finless porpoises in the Yangtze and two lakes linked to the waterway, according to a survey in 2012 by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and WWF. However, they are considered "functionally extinct", because water dams and shipping have blocked their travel and the population is too small for the species to reproduce. On Oct. 14, the Ministry of Agriculture issued a Yangtze finless porpoise protection notice urging local authorities to implement the most restrictive protection measures possible for the finless dolphin. Sources with the agriculture authorities said rescuers are expected to displace dolphins to safe havens whenever the mammal is found and rescued in the wild. (Xinhua/Zhu Weixi)