Be it fishing or commercial development, humans know no boundaries to make their ends meet – may even be at the cost of other lives. We, don’t seem to spare a thought for our very own nature, the environment we live in – devastating and manhandling its resources to an extend of even wiping out a species from the planet!
This is clearly revealed by the extinction of the rare dolphin from the Yangtze River, with an international research team failed to find a single of these ‘baiji’ in their during a six-week survey.
With only 13 found in the 1990s, this present disappearance of the marine mammal from the China’s river have left the NOAA Fisheries Service biologists disappointed and worried. Thanks to over-fishing and the regions commercial development, also leading to huge water pollution of the river.
One of the researchers, Barbara Taylor, a marine biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif., said,
This time, we detected no baiji, either visually or acoustically. This would be the first human-caused extinction of a dolphin or whale and it is particularly sad for the last member of a family of a species that is over 20 million years old.
This first step towards a feared complete disappearance of a cetacean from earth due to human activity is perhaps the reflection of human’s merciless ostracizing of the planet earth’s ailing state.
