On the evening of July 21, 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated its Red List of Endangered Species, and this time the Yangtze paddlefish, known as the "king of China's freshwater fish", was officially declared extinct.
The earliest Yangtze paddlefish can be traced back to the Cretaceous period 150 million years ago, they survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, and finally disappeared completely in the 21st century, which is embarrassing. Let's take a look back at the "fish birth" of the Yangtze paddlefish to commemorate their death.
The king of freshwater fish
The Yangtze paddlefish were called tuna and swordfish in ancient times. The reason why it is called swordfish is because the head of the Yangtze River paddlefish is very special, and it is particularly long, even reaching one-third of the body length, like a long sword. And can be called the "king of freshwater fish", the paddlefish itself is also very advantageous in size. Yangtze sturgeon is a large fish, its body length can generally reach 2~3 meters, up to 7 meters, the weight is sometimes close to 1 ton. In response to this, there is a saying of "thousands of catties and thousands of catties of elephants", and the elephant here does not refer to elephants, but white sturgeon. So the paddlefish has another name - elephant fish.
The paddlefish are not "little white flowers" bullied by fish, but very fierce hunters. Its food in the water is mainly other fish, unlike many fish that feed on plankton.
From time immemorial
The Yangtze paddlefish is an evolutionarily ancient fish belonging to the genus Sturgeon. Its ancestors were very diverse and widely distributed in the 75 million ~ 34 million years ago.
Sturgeon dating back 200 million years to the Cretaceous period, they have endured long geological epochs, including the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. In fact, for a long time, the Yangtze paddlefish were not limited to the Yangtze River basin, but were widely distributed in China's major rivers, such as the Liao River, Haihe River, Yellow River, Huai River, Qiantang River and even offshore waters.
However, with the passage of time, the distribution range of the Yangtze paddlefish became narrower and narrower, and after the 50s of the 20th century, the Yangtze paddlefish was only distributed in the Yangtze River and its estuary. For a long time, the Yangtze paddlefish can be caught commercially, such as the 70s of the 20th century, when the annual catch was as much as 25 tons.
Due to overfishing and fragmentation of the living environment, as well as the construction of a series of dams, the migration of the paddlefish in the Yangtze River has been severely affected, and the population has plummeted, becoming an endangered species.
The last "end" of the Yangtze paddlefish was in 2003.
On 24 January 2003, fishermen in Fuxikou, Liangting Village, Luolong Town, Nanxi County, Sichuan Province, found an injured white sturgeon from the Yangtze River, and he immediately reported it to the fishery authorities. Soon, rescuers arrived at the scene to protect and begin emergency rescue of the paddlefish. This is a large white sturgeon more than 3 meters long, with a mouth up to 1 meter long, languishing due to injury, and even its belly is facing the sky, revealing a snow-white color, which is often a danger signal for the imminent death of fish.
In order to allow the sturgeon to survive the crisis, rescuers jumped into the water to straighten the paddlefish's body and continuously oxygenated the water. Subsequently, the sturgeon was transferred to a relatively stable riverside for further treatment, and after strict disinfection of the wound and injection of the corresponding drugs, the Yangtze sturgeon was finally saved by surgical sutures and 24 stitches.
After the great white sturgeon recovered, rescuers released it back into the Yangtze River. To facilitate conservation and further tracking, the researchers also installed sonar for the paddlefish.
During this period, the researchers were able to track the sonar signal of the paddlefish, and found that the rescued great white sturgeon was able to swim freely in the Yangtze River, leaving many "footprints". On 30 January 2003, the tracking vessel tracking the great white sturgeon was damaged by accidentally hitting the rocks and could not continue sailing, resulting in a delay of six or seven hours. And it was this short separation of a few hours that made us lose the sonar signal of this great white sturgeon forever. Since then, professionals have searched for sonar signals in the Yangtze River many times, along the Yangtze River from Sichuan to Chongqing to Hubei, but still have not found any trace of this great white sturgeon, as if it has completely disappeared from the human world.
In 2020, the Jiang Fisheries Research Institute, president of the Chinese Fishery Science Research, published a paper pointing out that the Yangtze paddlefish were extinct from 2005 to 2010, but the IUCN believed that further demonstration was needed, so it concluded that "further discussion is needed". In 2022, the IUCN finally declared the Yangtze paddlefish completely extinct.
However, we still expect that this may be a miscalculation. Although the great white sturgeon has not been found again for nearly 20 years, perhaps they are just hiding, or they are just unnoticed, anything is possible, and maybe one day, we will find the "return of the king" of the Yangtze paddlefish.
More efforts are needed in the future
In fact, this time the IUCN announced that there is another sturgeon - the Yangtze sturgeon, which means that it is also in danger. Fortunately, however, there is still time, because we can now breed the Yangtze sturgeon artificially to establish a group of artificial colonies. Therefore, in the future, we will gradually establish a reserve through artificial breeding like giant pandas to make the Yangtze sturgeon extinct.
To protect biodiversity is to protect human beings themselves. In the past years, the ecological damage of the Yangtze River has been serious, and it has also led to the endangerment of fish such as Yangtze sturgeon and white-tip dolphins, and now the "protection of the Yangtze River" has become a consensus, since 2021, the mainland has officially implemented a "ten-year fishing ban" on the Yangtze River, and the "Yangtze River Protection Law of the People's Republic of China" has also been officially promulgated and implemented, which is of great significance to the ecological restoration of the entire Yangtze River Basin.
Perhaps in the future, we will see an increasingly prosperous Yangtze River ecology, and we will never see a tragedy similar to the extinction of the Yangtze paddlefish.