White Dolphin Functionally Extict 868
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in nearly fifty years another mammal, specifically an aquatic mammal, has gone extinct. In this case, it was the white dolphin, also known as the Baiji, which used to live in the Yangtze River in China. The dolphin had been known to exist for the last 20 million years."
article also extintict (Score:2, Interesting)
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The requested URL (science/06/12/13/1731222.shtml) was not found.
If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org.
But really, the best way to bring them back is to make them profitable. So... the answer is a "swim with the white dolphins" exhibit in China. Then, if the place can sell the swim with the dolphin experience for 200 bucks, people will start breeding and stop killing white dolphins!!
Perfect!
I'm not seeing the huge deal (Score:1, Interesting)
heartbreaking (Score:3, Interesting)
- Last Chance to See
, which is really an amazing book for those of you who haven't read it. The sadness of this situation will no doubt be marred by countless slashdot posts by the rabid anti-environmental right who tend to post on these sorts of stories.Last Chance to See (Score:2, Interesting)
Douglas Adams wrote "Last Chance to See...", with naturalist Mark Carwardine, and one of the endangered species they sought out was....
The Baiji river dolphin.
And now, the last chance has passed. I miss Mr. Adams, but I'm glad he didn't have to see it.
- j
Cataloguing DNA for future use (Score:5, Interesting)
Endgame (Score:2, Interesting)
Endgame [endgamethebook.org]
a couple quick excerpts relating to these dolphins:
Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.
Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.
Premise Fourteen: From birth on - and probably from conception, but I'm not sure how I'd make the case - we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes - and our bodies - to be poisoned.
Premise Nineteen: The culture's problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.
Douglass Adams (Score:5, Interesting)
I love how the publicity for the dolphins led to a media circus that resulted in them actually being considered a delicacy in the area.
Choice quotes from the book here: Douglas Adams: Last Chance to See Quotes [quotegeek.com]
Re:Cataloguing DNA for future use (Score:4, Interesting)
While it is not as dramatic as aliens saving human DNA without any of our culture, many animals don't function well if they don't have their parents (or other members of their species) to teach them how to survive.
Combine it with needing the rest of their habitat, and it is almost meaningless to talk about trying to "preserve" the species that way.
Re:I can only say... (Score:2, Interesting)
Humans are part of the environment for better or worse. We are something that animals have to adapt to. Animals that can't adapt will become extinct until we create an environment that we ourselves can't adapt to. And then the cockroaches will take over and the smartest cockroaches will start to rebuild civilization in their own way.
Your attitude shows that although you think you're an environmentalist you have lost sight of the fact that humans are nothing more than the most highly adapted _animals_ on the planet right now. Still animals. Life was here before humans, and it's virtually certain that it will still be here after we're gone.
Re:I can only say... (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet the only species in the entire world that gives a damn about preserving other species is human beings.
Re:I can only say... (Score:2, Interesting)
Feel free to go live there...
Re:Overloards (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I can only say... (Score:2, Interesting)
Modern Extinctions [wikipedia.org]
This is certainly not a complete list, but there are plenty of species listed as going extinct after 1956.
Re: Embraceable Monoculture (Score:3, Interesting)
1. I'm not here to teach you basic biology. Shame on you if you graduated high school without a basic understanding of the food chain.
2. Humans are creating biologic monoculture.
A pandemic WILL come along and without biodiversity we're all dead.
These are historical facts that cannot be argued away.
Still time to save the finless (Score:5, Interesting)
Alongside the search for the Baiji, the scientists surveyed also the population of the endemic Yangtze Finless Porpoise, and the total was less than 400. The situation of the finless propoise is just like that of the baiji 20 years ago, sais Wang Ding, deputy director of the Institute of Hydrobiology Wuhan. 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
http://www.baiji.org/expeditions/1/overview.html [baiji.org]
Re:Oops! (Score:3, Interesting)
The same is true about the expensive DVD player you just bought.
Re:How are your nice morality-safe leather shoes? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes a little rhetorical absurdity works, I think. All I'm doing is challenging the anonymous coward to actually spell out the distinction between the thought he probably never gives to the vast number of critters that die in industrial agriculture, vs. one that can't survive proximity to human existance. Just because you can't do something perfectly doesn't mean you should be paralyzed into doing nothing, of course.
it is immoral to kill conscious beings
Sentience is indeed a tricky business. Alert animals that exhibit complex reactions to complex surroundings and circumstances are certainly different than, say, an insect. But plenty of people would suggest that a bee-hive, taken as a whole, is more "cognitively complex" than a rabbit. And yet we enslave bees, don't we? They are killed with a swat at the slightest perception that they'll sting. I'm inclined to look at a given valley's deer population in much the same way. When the population reaches the point where the animals are - in search of less populated turf - wandering in front of cars and being painfully injured and killed, or when there are so many crowded into a small area that the healthy ones are quickly picking up diseases from the few that would normally already have wandered off alone to die - it's a situation that's way out of balance. And there are no predators left to deal with it. Wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions are no longer allowed to take care of business. And believe me, I do weigh carefully the similarities between a deer and myself. If you've never personally field dressed a deer that you've killed 10 minutes before, that's at least one way in which you've never confronted your own mortality, believe me. But then, if you've never had a drug-free, ultra-lean venison tenderloin roasted with some fruit and served with a nice Petit Syrah, you've also missed out.
Re:Chinese borders (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd believe that if it weren't for the extremely large number of pirates operating in Chinese waters. Assuming said pirates aren't operating with the full knowledge of the Government, of course.
And are pirates operating in the Yangtze river where this species of dolphin lives? Also, my guess is pirates know how to play the game so they don't get caught. I kinda doubt the greenpeace guys, or other environmental groups know how to do this.
the Government is unlikely to have made any serious effort to stop a group that saved said Government from political embarrassment or expense, particularly if said Government could claim credit for any success
If I were a Chinese government official, I might be leary of news travelling around that China couldn't stop the extinction of a species that only exists in China, and had to allow outsiders to do it.
Also, how expensive would it have been for any of these groups to mount a full-fledged captive breeding program? I certainly don't know.
My point is that's it's pretty easy to sit on your easy-chair and be critical of outside groups not stopping this. It's quite a bit different when you consider what it actually might take to do something about it. I have a hard time believing it's a simple movie-plot where they sneak into China, round up some dolphins, then high tail it out, with cute dolphins doing tricks on the ship while the credits role. (Throw in a love story, some personal sacrifice, and someone being left behind, and you've got yourself a summer blockbuster).
Re:Oops! (Score:2, Interesting)
Face it, humans are just animals, and their lives are no more important (other than in the thoughts of their friends/relatives) than the lives of animals. If anything, humans are more expendable thanks to their out of control breeding.
Really, it seems that all this handwringing about how precious human life is came from religious foundations, where people seek some sort of justificiation for their inconsequential existence by telling themselves that 'god' said they were the Earth's king shit and that's that.
And to those who would claim that human life is more precious than animal life... why? Because our advanced brain allowed us to creatively exploit and ravage mother nature as opposed to those stupid, underevolved animals who live in harmony with her? Please.
Re:Oops! (Score:2, Interesting)
Shut up already!
You and your ilk will go about spouting on about 'Evolution this' and 'Evolution that' but give no mind to the fact that IF Evolution is real, then guess what: We, the humans, are on top of the game and when humans, in all our Natural Selection glory, get no pass for having come out on top. But, no, when the process of Natural Selection happens, you cry "foul!" as if there's something wrong with Natural Selection.
So, tell me, how is it you want your cake and to eat it to: Is Natural Selection (which you mistakenly call Evolution concerning the disappearance of this dolphin) the real deal or is it that we, as humans, have a moral duty to steward this earth and the things there on? And, if we have a moral duty: says who? You? God? If it's you, what makes you so right? If it's God, why do you go on about Evolution?
Choose sides:
Re:Oops! (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a large difference between "If between my father and some stranger, I can only save one, so I save my father", and "To save my father, I'm going to kill a stranger." Everyone understands if I throw the single life ring to my dad instead of some random guy (though I'd try hard to save both); everyone also undertands that it would be monsterous if I killed the stranger to get the new heart that my dad (hypothetically) needed.
My father's life is more precious to me, sentimentally, than that of a stranger, so if all else is equal and no one's rights are being violated his claims have priority to me. But his life is not, ethically, more precious than that of a stranger; I cannot make a good argument that his life is more precious than J. Random Stranger, so I'm going to kill J. Random Stranger to harvest that heart. We all understand that to be a violation of J. Random Stranger's rights.
Similarly, we all understand that if a dog and a human are both drowning and we can only save one, we save the human. (Usually. If it's Hitler versus Lassie, I'm saving Lassie.) But this does not imply anything about the ethics of harming the dog for the human's potential benefit.
Re:Oops! (Score:3, Interesting)
To anyone with an ounce of self respect and sense, it is obvious that "god" (as generally described in the west) is essentially a lie created by men to simultaneously instill both fear and hope in their fellow men. This lie grew with the success of the organizations that promoted it into the lynchpin of the major western/formal religions of today (except Buddhism).
This doesn't even start with some of the abhorrent things the Bible/Koran and other holy texts tells us to do, or the complete and total lack of reality in the stories promoted by the religious organizations. Simply by iteslf - the story of a sentient being that created the universe lacks credibility and consistency with observed reality.
Re:Oops! (Score:3, Interesting)
Value is always subjective, and our facile attachment to human-shaped beings only obscures the deeper, broader value intrinsic to all life. If we are objective and deeply honest, we must admit that we as a species and we as a culture are utterly blind.
I was disheartened recently to hear Peter Singer (sometimes called "the father of the Animal Rights movement") quoted in an interview, saying that animal testing could be justified on the basis of the good it does for humanity. It struck me deeply, and still I'm caught up in contemplation of that word: "justified." That's a word we really need to take a close hard look at. Ideals, wishes, hopes, attachments, and feelings are no basis for "justification."
If we are even braver, we can realize that all "justification" is based on our own convenient fictions. It is a social construct. If my reasoning is acceptable to my culture, I can feel "justified" in my actions. All any justification requires is emotional and rational sympathy from my respected peers. This allows me to feel absolved for the deeds I may worry over.
Justification has a certain psychological value, insofar as it keeps us feeling okay about ourselves. After all, in this world we have to act, and since there is no central agent responsible for our personal choices, justification is necessary to uphold the integrity of the rational mind. We need justification to preserve the perception that we are a force for good in the world. And we need it to feel that our will is wholly our own. In short, we need it to bolster the convenient fictions that keep us ensconced in our rational illusions.
Well, that's the general idea anyways.
running cattle into a chute... (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought cows went happily to their these days, ever since that autistic woman redesigned the slaughterhouses.
See BBC Horizon programme "The Woman Who Thinks Like A Cow"...
I call bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
About premise fourteen. First, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Nobody teaches people to hate living things, people don't hate living things and spend their life fulfilling their urge to destroy life. They just don't care most of the time, and if they can improve their own lives while not caring about wildlife, they do it. It's all about gread and short sight. Hate doesn't enter into it.
About premise ten. The culture is not driven by death urge, this would not be profitable. This culture is driven by advertisment induced urge to consume tons of useless shit.
About premise six. I don't know what can be done to change this situation. But people crying to "put halt to it" also rarely do. How do you make billions of people to change their lifestyle overnight? Put all of them in prison? Stick guns to their heads and force them to do what you say for the sake of saving earth? How do you gain more power than corporations/individuals who profit from the current way of life? How do you make people join your cause if they are already living in comfort and don't want to get up from their couch?
The problem with earth, is that earth is commons, and tragedy of commons (see the wikipedia) applies to it. It will always be profitable to overuse/overexploit earth for personal gain, and screw the others. Regulation and government intervention can slow this down, but only a little.
--Coder