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If China’s finless porpoise is doomed, so is the mighty Yangtze River on which it depends

The fate of the critically endangered ‘river pig’ is inextricably tied to that of the waterway it calls home. Whether it survives or goes way of the white dolphin depends entirely on the success of an ambitious river clean-up campaign.

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A finless porpoise in the Tianezhou Oxbow Nature Reserve, in the Yangtze River Basin, in China’s Hubei province. Photo: Justin Jin

Published: 2:00pm, 10 May 2020Updated: 10:50am, 11 May 2020

As the story goes, a lonely Chinese princess was to be married to a man with whom she was not in love. On refusing, her father pushed her into the Yangtze River, where she drowned. The waters, however, took pity on Princess Baiji and reincarnated her as a dolphin, and for millennia, the so-called Goddess of the Yangtze pulsed her slender body through the river’s currents.

Over the past four decades, however, the goddess was again betrayed. As China crested an economic wave, the baiji, or “white dolphin”, was ill-equipped to fend for herself. Fishermen took her food, and their nets and propellers brutalised her. The increasingly toxic waters sealed her fate and, in 2006, she succumbed, becoming the first dolphin to be driven to extinction by humans.

It set a horrible precedent for other species, including the giant Chinese paddlefish, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, which was declared extinct this January. The Yangtze sturgeon is on the brink of disappearance, too. But remarkably – possibly miraculously – Princess Baiji’s less-famous chubby cousin still survives. For now.

The Yangtze finless porpoise is fleshy and rotund – nicknamed “river pig” by locals – and its mouth is fixed in a permanent cartoon grin. In 1991, China counted about 2,500 finless porpoises in the Yangtze. And while the baijis are now gone, just under 1,000 of these smiling river pigs remain – a population smaller than that of the giant panda.

A finless porpoise in the Tianezhou Oxbow Nature Reserve. Photo: Justin Jin

This porpoise is now so critically endangered that, without direct intervention, the Yangtze’s last surviving aquatic mammal will suffer the same fate as the baiji in as little as a few years.

“If the river porpoise goes extinct,” says WWF China’s head of water practice, Ren Wenwei, “we will have failed to save the Yangtze itself.”