How I came to learn about the Yangtze River finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides)

First, because this is a blog, I get to put in a little of my own personal story. The key thing is that I love animals and nature. I like to think that I know a lot about them, but the truth is that I know very little now.  I remember reading a book when I was little titled something like Weird Animals. It was there that I learned about the star-nosed mole, komodo dragon, and either the Chinese or Amazon river dolphin. In my mind they closely resembled each other. I remember thinking that the river dolphin was not very cute. Its nose is a little too long, giving the dolphin an unintelligent expression. I did not think about the animal again until years later when I was in China studying abroad. As with the rest of the world, the country is facing environmental degradation. What I had been unaware of before stepping on a boat in Chongqing was the tragic history of China's natural environment. I looked at the water and wondered how anything could live in it. Excessive deforestation upstream had had an impact on the river's silt levels. The water was orange in color. At this point I vaguely remembered that there was supposed to be a river dolphin swimming and fishing around in those waters.

That was in July of 2009. After the trip I looked online to see what had become of the Yangtze river dolphin. My heart sank to my stomach when I read that it had been declared functionally extinct only TWO YEARS earlier. I could not believe that an animal that I had learned about as a child was gone forever. Through reading Judith Shapiro's Mao's War Against Nature and Jung Chan's Wild Swans, I learned that the dolphin's demise was actually due to Mao's strange policies. I won't go into those details because they are pretty contentious and that is not the point of this blog. In any case, their current survival status (read:0) would probably be close to the same because of the heavy pollution, siltation, and overfishing that now threatens an animal that I had not known existed until a year ago-the Yangtze River finless porpoise. At that time, I was back in China doing an internship and had made the acquaintance of a visiting environmental council member from New Zealand. I met him at a conference on water pollution and a little after that I received a text from him saying that he was at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Wuhan, looking at a few finless porpoises. I nearly jumped out of my skin I was so excited. I immediately wrote back that I was envious and wanted to see them myself. This was actually the first time I had even heard of them, but they had porpoise in their name, therefore were related to dolphins, and so I had to go. He passed on the director's contact information and about a month later I took a train out from Nanjing. It bothers me that I had never heard of them before this. So much attention is given to certain charismatic megafauna (pandas, elephants, polar bears), but here was an intelligent, unique animal that was under threat and that no one seemed to be talking about outside of the Institute at Wuhan. It leaves me with a feeling of cognitive dissonance.

In between the time that I first learned about them and when I went to visit them at Wuhan, I also got to see them in their natural habitat. Poyang Lake serves as a key habitat area for finless porpoises in spring through fall. The best time to see them is spring or fall, and I went during the mid-Autumn festival in early September. During a water quality monitoring trip around the lake we spotted around ten dolphins, in pods of two or three. For ecologists, I think that spotting wildlife such as these produces a visceral reaction. Nothing gets us more excited and as quickly as the unexpected sighting of a rare animal in the wild or an up-close interaction with a wild animal. Even my supervisor, who is a serious biogeochemist and professor in Nanjing, basically jumped up and down with excitement at each sighting. I love when people are excited to see animals. It feels like it means more allies in the mission to help people live sustainably and stop threatening the existence of other species.

Blog introduction

This blog will be an analysis of current environmental and policy issues. At the start it will have a broad focus. I will take one issue per week and take two or three days to discuss it from different angles - economic, political, and scientific. The first set, to begin next week, will be an analysis of the survival prospects for the Chinese finless porpoise, or 江豚. While interning in the Yangtze River Delta region of China last year, I was able to visit the Wuhan Hydrolobiological Institute where, among other things, they study the biology of these animals.