Lead
The Spring Festival of 2022 has just passed, but at this time, there is embarrassing news in the Yangtze River.
The news is about a rare animal that has lived in the Yangtze River for nearly 200 million years - the white sturgeon.
In the Spring Festival of 2022, the white sturgeon was officially declared extinct, and was officially declared "extinct" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
So as a freshwater fish in China's Yangtze River, why is it so famous?
Why is it still difficult to escape this fate in the end?
Perhaps this even reminds people that it is possible that humans have relied on their own strength to push a freshwater fish king directly to the end of the road, so is it possible that the white sturgeon can reappear in the Yangtze River?
1. Freshwater fish king.
The white sturgeon was the first fish that gradually appeared on the earth during the Cretaceous period, which is nearly 100 million years ago, and it is its fiery red upper body and broad body that make people give it the title of "pearl of the river".
As a sturgeon in the Yangtze River, the largest white sturgeon has a maximum length of seven or eight meters and weighs more than dozens of catties; In late summer and early autumn, it will be more than a few pounds.
The white sturgeon has the ability to live and survive between the ocean and fresh water, and it is precisely because of this ability to live in the ocean and survive and reproduce in rivers and lakes that it has become the most mysterious animal in ancient myths and legends, such as the dragon king, the phoenix, and the Yu Yu.
So why is the white sturgeon so great today when it is rapidly extinct and its vitality is far less than before?
The extinction of the white sturgeon is inextricably linked to human activities.
The number of white sturgeon was quite abundant in the Tang and Song dynasties, and many people could see the white sturgeon in the Yangtze River, but this made people at that time have the feeling of overfishing, as long as they have fishing nets in their hands, they have the possibility of returning with a full load.
It was not until the middle of the Qing Dynasty that the population of the white sturgeon dropped sharply, and the situation of extinction began to appear in the white sturgeon.
Therefore, the emperors of the Qing Dynasty at that time ordered the white sturgeon to be closely protected, and then the white sturgeon was almost extinct at that time, and almost no one saw the white sturgeon in the river again.
Therefore, a year after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the central government also listed the white sturgeon as a first-class protected animal because it was almost extinct, so that it could continue to protect it.
In this way, the fiery figure of the white sturgeon in the river came to the present day, but when people found the white sturgeon again, there were only twenty or thirty left.
Second, the last white sturgeon.
In 2003, when there were only a dozen sturgeons in number, a scholar who rescued the giant sturgeon caught two sturgeons in less than an hour when he was sampling in the Yangtze River.
Scholars observed and sampled the data on the buoy, and the data showed that the white sturgeon's swimming radius was only a few hundred meters, which was far from the original activity radius of the white sturgeon, which indicates that this white sturgeon was the last white sturgeon to swim from the Yangtze River in time.
In order to be able to release this white sturgeon into the Yangtze River, we matched a sturgeon that is similar in size to the white sturgeon in case of emergency.
However, in 2007, the sturgeon population declined dramatically and almost disappeared, causing unprecedented panic among the population, who also did not take into account the sturgeon's range of movement, which coincided with the spawning season of the sturgeon during the release of the sturgeon.
As a result, as the size of the white sturgeon, the eggs of the sturgeon, which are already scarce, are treated as fish eggs, and the fish are hatched by their own methods, and the eggs of the white sturgeon are hatched, and the survival of the white sturgeon is even weaker.
Although the scholars are still full of hope, they also know that only a final rescue of the white sturgeon can maintain the white sturgeon population at a low level.
In order to allow this white sturgeon to continue to survive and the population of the white sturgeon to continue to survive, scholars have also tried their best, but unfortunately, in the end, this white sturgeon still died in the hands, which makes people sigh.
3. Self-help.
Because the white sturgeon has long been on the verge of extinction in everyone's mind, some people have long been worried and suggested to speed up the rescue and cultivation of the white sturgeon.
In 1991, Zeng Xianming, director of the Yangtze River Fisheries Management Committee, proposed to restock the sturgeon, but in the end, the stocking of white sturgeon in the Yangtze River had not yet been carried out because there was no data on this at the time.
It wasn't until 2005 that Cheng Wei, a professor at Shanghai Fisheries University, joined forces with Lu Xiaoyun and others from Shanghai Ocean University to select lakes along the Yangtze River to stock white sturgeon.
The stocking experiment also gave people a glimmer of hope, so in the following time, the white sturgeon gradually recovered with people's efforts, but this recovery only lasted for a few years.
With the continuous construction and improvement of the dam, the dam still cannot stop the progress of the white sturgeon upstream, even though the stocking work is still going on with the encouragement of everyone.
Soon, the sturgeon's natural breeding grounds downstream of the dam were gradually crushed into gravel spoil, and eventually it was the dam built by humans that directly limited the sturgeon population to a very low level.
epilogue
There are also Chinese sturgeons and Yangtze sturgeons in China, which are also sturgeons in the Yangtze River, but because the number of Chinese sturgeons is so scarce, many people have never even seen the real Chinese sturgeon in the river, and the Yangtze River sturgeon is also too "active", coupled with the construction of dams, so it has a worse experience than the white sturgeon - extinction in the wild.
If modern humans want to reproduce the white sturgeon, or to allow the white sturgeon to survive in the Yangtze River again, it is necessary to protect the living environment of the white sturgeon from the source, so that the population of the white sturgeon can gradually recover.
At the same time, human research on this ancient species can also allow people to continue to expand the direction of future research, and may also provide better solutions for the rescue of white sturgeon, so that the population of white sturgeon continues to recover.
In the same way, I also hope that this kind of attention and loss of rare species can lead people to pay attention to ecological protection and work hard for the diversity of life and the continuation of the ecosystem!
Extended perspective
Fragile biodiversity and the diversity of species that are vulnerable to loss are among the main features of the ecological crisis.
With the continuous expansion of human activities, the relatively narrow space in the biosphere has become narrower and narrower, which has seriously threatened the living environment of many species.
The extinction of rare animals is not only a matter of biodiversity loss, but can also have a significant impact on ecosystems and affect the entire ecological balance.
Therefore, the conservation of extinct species not only needs to be rescued at the individual level, but also fundamentally emphasizes the protection of the ecological environment and biodiversity.
The rules of nature are their own solutions, which is a "cycle", but human beings are shuttling back and forth in this natural world, building the cities they want, and causing unprecedented damage to the ecological environment.
This has made the originally ecological balance of the natural world more and more chaotic, and also caused some rare wild animals that were not in large numbers to suffer an unprecedented survival crisis.
If we don't protect the ecological environment and rare wild animals, we will have to do whatever goes wrong.
People's attention to rare animals and conservation actions should not only stay on the surface, but also need to think about the impact of human activities on the natural world, start from human beings, and support the conservation of biodiversity from the government's decision-making.
Just as the development of science and technology can also allow us to protect the natural world and biodiversity through more scientific means.
With the continuous strengthening of conservation awareness, it is also expected that through the joint efforts of the whole society, the number of more endangered species will continue to increase, and in the near future, we are expected to be able to see rare species.
It is believed that in the near future, people will be able to see the white sturgeon reappear!