Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
reports increasingly acknowledged that participants were reaffirming recommendations made
at previous meetings, were surprised by the extreme similarity of views given more than a
decade earlier on key issues, and expressed disappointment and concern that so little progress
had been made towards implementing conservation actions (e.g. Smith &
Reeves, 2000;
Braulik et al., 2005). Why, then, was so little actually achieved in the struggle to save the
baiji?
In situ
conservation measures must always be addressed as a primary recovery strategy
for any endangered species. However, the escalating anthropogenic impacts on the Yangtze
ecosystem throughout the late twentieth century that drove unsustainable levels of incidental
dolphin mortality were probably irreversible in the time period required to prevent the
disappearance of the baiji from its natural habitat, due to human-wildlife conflicts not only
with local communities across the baiji's range but also with ongoing national-scale economic
and industrial development that relied heavily on the river's resources. The series of existing
in situ
National and Provincial Baiji Reserves in the main Yangtze channel could certainly
have been more adequately managed and policed, with greater control of illegal fishing
practices in particular; but it is highly unlikely that protection in a series of discrete,
unconnected river sections, exposed to uncontrollable through-flow of pollutants, vessel
traffic and other threat factors, would have been able to delay the decline of a wide-ranging
dolphin species with unknown site fidelity in any substantial way. Wider-scale Yangtze
regeneration projects were also certainly necessary for long-term baiji persistence, as well as
for the conservation of the river system's many other highly threatened endemics, but they
remained impossible to effect in time, and were sadly insufficient for continued short-term
survival of the species. This tragic situation was increasingly recognized by international
conservationists such as Dudgeon (2005), who concluded that ‗the baiji is certain to become
extinct if left to languish in the Yangtze'.
It is the lack of success in developing a viable
ex situ
recovery program that raises more
fundamental concerns about the efficacy of both national and international conservation
efforts to save the baiji. Intensive species-level manipulations have long been recognized as
crucial for conserving species with tiny population sizes and rapid rates of decline and where
major cause(s) of decline cannot be determined or quickly corrected, and such approaches
have been widely credited for effecting successful species recoveries impossible by other
methods. The establishment of a closely managed baiji breeding program
at Tian'e-Zhou was
first proposed over twenty years ago, when the wild baiji population was estimated at 300
individuals (Chen & Hua, 1989), and it has since been repeatedly recommended in workshop
reports and the scientific literature as an urgent recovery strategy. The semi-natural
conservation approach was also widely publicized in popular international accounts of
Chinese conservation (e.g. Adams & Carwardine, 1990; Schaller, 1993; Laidler & Laidler,
1996). However,
ex situ
propagation remains controversial, as it inevitably involves higher-
risk intensive contact activity compared to ecosystem-scale programs, and there is widespread
caution amongst policy-makers towards such interventionist techniques (see Clark, 1997;
Snyder & Snyder, 2000; Groombridge et al., 2004; Flueck & Smith-Flueck, 2006;
VanderWerf et al., 2006). Although the international conservation community eventually
concluded that removal and translocation of baiji to a safer environment was the only feasible
option to save the species from extinction, and identified this action as the key short-term goal
in a longer-term recovery strategy for the species (Braulik et al., 2005), earlier more
equivocal attitudes outside China about the potential success or necessity of such a strategy
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