Rare fish species on the mainland, white sturgeon, which are older than dinosaurs, have been declared extinct.
Recently, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) officially announced that the sturgeon (Chinese white sturgeon) inhabiting the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in China has become extinct.
The white sturgeon lives nearly 100 years in natural water bodies in the wild and is known for its shovel-like nose. On the mainland, known as the "King of Freshwater Fish", it is regarded as a national treasure along with the giant panda, but in the end it did not escape the fate of extinction.
Sturgeon first appeared on Earth in the early Cretaceous period, about 150 million years ago. The last live white sturgeon was reported to have appeared in 2003, and four years later, it was hooked and killed by a fish. Since then, researchers have surveyed the entire Yangtze River basin from 2017 to 2018, but have never found a single living specimen.
The last video of the white sturgeon in the Yangtze River
What caused the extinction of the white sturgeon?
In the late 1970s, the prevalence of sturgeon caviar led to overfishing in the Yangtze River Basin, and after the completion of the Gezhou Dam in 1981 and the Three Gorges Dam in 2006, the regressive white sturgeon declined sharply due to its inability to travel to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River where it spawned. Since then, the pollution of the Yangtze River water body is also one of the main reasons for the eventual extinction of the white sturgeon, in addition, there are more than 24 species of fish in the Yangtze River that are also in a declining situation.