Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, declared extinct
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
[1]https://www.amazon.com/River-Town-Years-Yangtze-P-S/dp/00608...
The construction of the dam can bring a lot of immediate benefits, which is insignificant compared with the ecological damage caused, because if the economic development is not good, the environmental pollution will only be more serious, and the phenomenon of survival through predation of wild animals will only be more common.
And the dam in this article, which may related with the extinction of the Chinese paddlefish, is Gezhouba Dam. It was built from 1970 to 1988.
The Gezhouba Dam was constructed in 1988s, back then people's understanding of ecology and conservation was poor. And people were starving, economy was so poor that its hard to imagine what it was like back then. I think its not too crazy to think that people would prioritize certain things over others. Today, ecology considerations are very much part of the construction process.
As the article also suggested, overfishing is another huge contributor to ecosystem loss. In 60s, the Chinese paddlefish was being fished and sold like cabbages. By the 80s, fisherman would catch very little of the fish. The poor yield pushed some fisherman to use extreme tactics, like electric fishing and explosives, and that causes even more damages to the fish population. Last year, the yangtz protection law was passed. There is a host of actions there but one of it is complete ban of fishing on the yangtz for 10 years. And there are over 280,000 fisherman on the yangtz. There are also lots of government effort to support their livelihoods and transition them to other jobs.http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/c23934/202103/8cccd3c25caf4...
Multiple cradle of civilization level sites were flooded with not enough funding or effort given to excavating these sites thoroughly before flooding.
Especially since the Three Gorges Dam predates Bitcoin by 2 or 3 decades.
Overall, I learned that the dam has an impressively high power production, nothing more.
Anyone here with Dam experience wish to comment?
[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/e...
Among other similar reasons (overfishing, pollution), dams are related to its decline: "Series of dams on rivers such as those constructed on the Missouri River have impounded large populations of American paddlefish, and blocked their upstream migration to spawning shoals.[29]"
But it's not too late...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_paddlefish#Population...
Giant 'river monster' fish found in Detroit River may be over 100 years old
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/sturgeon-fish-intl-scli/in...
Spoken like someone who doesn't work in manufacturing...
There's a bit of an inflection point, because some fabrication/production has proved problemmatic beimg outsourced. For instance, turbine blades for jet engine manufacturing fabricated from certain lots of Chinese steel have had failure traced back to elevated sulfur levels in the atmosphere in China that weren't accomodated for in the original planning. That's just one example I know of.
Take this with a grain of salt. It's a hobby of mine, not my primary day-to-day, so if I'm talking out my rear, I'd love to be corrected by someone inside the industry. I'm a logistics nerd deep down, so I love drinking in these types of arcane quirks of reality vs. in theory.
Reserve currencies create huge beneficiaries and losers (especially in “tradables” like manufacturing).
Different arguments on this subject:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-bring-back-u-s-manufacturing...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dollar-and-the-future-of-u-...
https://www.dfw.state.or.us/resources/visitors/bonneville_ha...
>In 2003, Wei and colleagues attached a tracking tag to a Chinese paddlefish that was accidentally captured near Yibin, in south-central China. They released it to see where it might go, but within hours lost all signals from the tag. That was the last of the species ever seen alive.
Dams should not be considered “clean” energy. They’re environmental disasters. Both upstream and downstream.
Hard disagree.
Dams simply need to be categorized as dirty energy. They are probably less dirty than coal or natural gas energy. However dams are dirty and they should be treated as such.
Categorizing an energy source as dirty does not mean we don't use it. It doesn't even mean we don't build more of it. We don't have 100% clean energy today. I hope that someday we do. And when we are 100% clean energy I hope that 0% of it comes from dams. Because dam energy is extremely unclean, damaging, and harmful. And it's not "NIMBY" to say so.
I have come across messages stating that Trees sequester Carbon for now only to release it all eventually, but Trees provide much more. They provide oxygen, a habitat for animal and insect life, they cool down an area, help attract clouds for rain, hold together the ground soil to prevent erosion, etc.
We ought to be reforesting and afforesting land again to compensate for all the cover that we've lost. Ensuring forests would help carbon-offset the carbon-load required to set up Low Carbon energy sources for locations that need them.
Probably well burned wood and other biomass might qualify. Though that is quite complex thing to do at least with particulate emissions...
Baffling. I don't believe for a second that the amount of jobs a dam brings is in any way close to worth the cost of having to move an entire town or village, and the revenue is just laughable - that goes to random pension funds and banks thousands of kms away if its a public company or to some investor's pockets if its not, neither of which benefit locals
The "Las Vegas Frog" have a stroke of luck, but it is always the same history
And the californian vaquita is probably extinct yet.
"The tiny vaquita porpoise is the world’s most endangered marine mammal. Its numbers are decreasing with fewer than 19 remaining. Vaquitas die from entanglement in illegal gillnets which are intended to catch totoaba, in a lucrative illegal fishery that serves an illegal trade of swim bladders to China."
https://www.mmc.gov/priority-topics/species-of-concern/vaqui...
I wad expecting something a bit more sophisticated/under the fish's control, even given the name!
Still, there’s an argument to be made for building a bypass or fish ladder in every single new and existing dam regardless of what the current expected impact is.
Then I remind myself most of humanity history is characterized by a marked tendency toward anthropocentrism, and I cease being surprised.
What surprises me now even more was that there were designs for fish ladders even as far back as the 19th century.
My guess: a political, hasty, rush to success to curry favor and clout drove bad decisions regarding a massive government project. Is that not the way of public bureaucracy, universally?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paddlefish_Polyodon_spath...
from here :
It's generally my understanding that extant species have all continued evolving and while a creature may have strong morphological resemblance to its ancestor it is not the same species. Therefore, to say this creature "survived" the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event would be to say all extant species survived it. Am I misunderstanding this?
when you hear statements like this, the thing that survives is the overall anatomical structure and adaptations indistinguishable from fossil remains except by the fact that fossilization has occured
youare asking a legitimate question, and trying to clear up your own self recognized misunderstanding, sorry to see your comment going gray like that
if you want to talk about genetic modifications that is sequitorial however the framing of the statement involves anatomical structure, thus the confusions that have arisen over time.
Then there might at least be a chance to bring them back one day?
I doubt DNA alone will be enough, though. Mothers provide proteins and messenger RNA to their offspring, and the young may learn crucial skills from their parents.
If you put mammoth DNA in an elephant egg, you may get something that looks like a mammoth, but will it ever behave like one?
Whether this means the bottleneck hypothesis is overstated, or that we're looking at a tremendous number of bottlenecks, isn't clear.
Vs large mammals where raising one genetically-hobbled offspring (who then dies, or fails to reproduce) is a huge loss to the potential of the species.
How effective are fish ladders? If they’re effective, shouldn’t we focus on building a fish ladder on all existing dams?
No doubt there are some ineffective fish ladders out there, and no doubt dams have a negative impact on fish populations. Could better designed fish ladders and compensation channels mitigate the effect of the dam? I think so.
Fish stocks across all species are collapsing due to overfishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_(water_navigation)
No jumping required
It mostly talking about how in the 80 and 90s they didn't do those preservation research when building dams.
The article also talks that its not only happening in China these old paddlefish species are endangered all over the globe.
Agree species are dying everywhere after all we are in an Holocene extinction event. That said it seems to happening at a faster pace in places like India and China with unfettered development.
Most efforts to preserve animals come after the damage is done. That's why we maintain an endangered species list.
I'm not going to argue that China is as committed to, or as successful at, the goal as say the US is, but "not as good" is very different from claiming they fundamentally lack something the West possesses.
Perhaps this isn't about nations, but about 1) how sad it is for such a unique species to be extinct, 2) a cautionary tale.
Also, where I live (Indiana, USA) we have a native paddlefish species that was nearly fished to extinction by a ring of criminals that were killing them for their caviar. I wonder if something like that was happening with the Yangtze version? (Article doesn't mention)
how are they doing now? recovering?
As someone in the US, I know about the EPA and the DOI. I don't however know of such comparable government level agencies in China or any other country.
Whenever anyone asks a question about certain countries, the responses are hypercritical, adversarial or defensive regardless of the questioner's intent.
I simply asked, and continue to ask without anyone being able to answer it: Are there any organizations in China that have any real power to do anything to protect the ecosystems critical to animal life or is it unfettered development >> ecosystem.
Nevertheless, the organisation tasked with protecting the environment in China is called the Ministry of Ecology and Environment. To quote Wikipedia:
> The Center for American Progress has described China's environmental policy as similar to that of the United States before 1970. That is, the central government issues fairly strict regulations, but the actual monitoring and enforcement are largely undertaken by local governments that have a greater interest in economic growth.
What remarkable a looking fish, it looks more like a shark with a very elongated nose. Well, pat-on the-back progress aside of their 'efforts', I feel that this is in-line with not just the CCP's outview on the World, but Humanity in general.
Biodiversity be damned (no pun intended) if it stands in the way of short term gain(s). Personally speaking, I think Wildlife and Marine biologists need to collaborate on maintaining these species all over the World in captivity, a real purpose for a zoo if there ever was one, to avoid this problem. I can't stand to see a wolf or a giraffe in a zoo, it makes me sad and I haven't been to one since I was forced to go when I was kid.
As an adult I could justify going every 6 months if I knew these served primarily as a way to conserve endangered animals. Pandas being a chief example of it already being done.
I have a lot of qualms with zoos in general and places like Sea World, I went to university with a well known marine biology program and the amount of collusion between Sea World and the biology department was rather blatant at times.
The lessons we learned from the past 20 years in Tuna farming should serve as a model of what happens when you deplete the Oceans so bad you have to resort to man-made hatcheries for a highly consumed staple--I fear that this species of fish may not have the same recognition and thus a market price for it's survival and thus is deemed insignificant.
Despite being a staunch Free Market advoacte, I'm well aware of the inadequacies of market based solutions alone to prevent, let alone, solve environmental setbacks like these and I fear we have run of time or options that ensured Governments could solve these either. It will require a massive uptick in the need of individuals to do this.
If social media can topple a career with cancel culture over minor indiscretions, and make corporations apologize for BS things deemed not palatable to 'woke' mob then surely a strong drive to make them accountable for conservation should be possible, too.
This being China, I think it's low on the list of atrocities the CCP has committed, even against it's species and this very little will be done to do more than distract from the real issue.
Calling it simply 'development' obscures the very real human benefits.
We have the same issue here in the US. I'm less familiar with dams, so I'll talk about the channelization of rivers to keep them navigable year-round for transportation of goods. The Missouri River used to meander to a much, much greater extent than it does now. It used to move back and forth over the course of hundreds of years between the loess deposits in the Midwest. This created a number of slow-moving backwaters where many species of fish would lay their eggs. The most common example of this is the pallid sturgeon.
With the straightening and taming of the river, they lost most, if not all of their breeding habitat. Capture of individuals that are under 15 years old that are not traceable back to a captive breeding project is essentially unheard of. Even adults which are not tagged and previously used for breeding are few and far between.
If you don't care about fish, how about birds? The Platte river was historically described as a mile wide and an inch deep. It was marshy, slow-moving, and full of sand bars where birds like the Piping Plover made their nests. In order to reduce the flood risk and claim some of that fertile land for agriculture, the stream was directed into a much narrower and straighter path. With more water flowing down a narrower channel, sandbars became much less common and were at much higher risk of being washed over, taking eggs and chicks with them. The interior population of the plover was drastically reduced. At the same time, the population on the eastern seaboard were being displaced from their dunes along the Atlantic Ocean. People like the beach, like living there and like playing in the sand. That habitat was taken over by homes and businesses and what was left semi-natural was used for recreation and the birds could no longer safely nest there.
Human use and animal use have to be balanced. Relatively few species can thrive directly alongside humans, but humanity isn't going anywhere any time soon either. It's not the fault of the 9-year-old who wants to run through the dunes that these animals are disappearing, but we still need to keep a certain amount of nature in its natural state so that we don't lose even more of our native species.
Dams are necessary in some cases to keep homes from flooding. However there's got to be a better solution that damming a river completely and building in what used to be valuable habitat.
Legend has it that one of the early great kings of china was 大禹 (Yu the Great). But what made him great? Was he a great conqueror like Alexander? Was he a descendant of the gods? No. Yu was "great" because he built the first major floods control projects for the Yangtze river. Pause and think about this for bit. How horrible must the floods have been for a king to have literally entered legendary status for managing them?
The Yangtze river has been the lifeblood of northern China for thousands of years. But it has also literally killed 100's of millions of people. Historically, the river floods quite often, and once in a while floods on a massive, epic, scale. The sort of flood that covers thousands of square miles under many meters of water. The sort of flood that wipes out settlements across vast swaths of land and kill millions of people. Then millions die of disease and starvation. The mouth of the Yangtze has moved hundreds of miles during recorded history. And this doesn't happen little by little... it happens catastrophically with huge floods that have kill 10s of millions. Think of the Mississippi mouth moving from where it is today to someplace in south texas or georgia. The Yangtze river is that kind of epic (but not in the good way).
The Three Gorges Dam was built with the intention of finally, once and for all, controlling the Yangtze. Now, in a few centuries, maybe history will show that it was a bad idea. Or maybe history will show it was one of the most important works of civil construction in human history. Hard to say right now.
But what is clear is that it wasn't built with "short term gain" in mind. That dam is the definition of long-term civil engineering (for good or ill).
Unless you're including sturgeon in that group, there is now only one surviving species of paddlefish. That one, thanks to heavy conservation efforts, is listed as vulnerable, but not endangered. It's actually legal to sport fish in many states but takes are heavily regulated. The closely related sturgeon species are also struggling.
The environment collapsing so that it can’t support people is a pretty drastic leap from running certain fish into extinction.
The Soviet fishing fleet also massacred a huge amount of whales just to meet dumb quotas imposed in a centrally planned economy. There was not much real demand for whale meat or oil in the Soviet Union.
My suspicion is that the CCP has no real effort or interest and the lack of people able to answer with a: Yes the CCP is seriously trying to protect the environment/ecosystem/species through the following things likely speaks to the lack of interest/initiative.
The CCP cares about the environment insofar as it benefits China. They probably do not care about a fish going extinct the way we do.
PRC does not deny they exist, nor denies that organs are harvested after. There are pictures of them online, and notable cases where it was the officially recorded method of execution.
The first ever mobile lethal injection van was actually, as far I know, from Delaware in 1986 : http://www.doc.delaware.gov/deathrow/history.shtml [1]
Beyond lethal injection vans, around a half dozen countries also employed gas chamber vans, with the first known example being in Nazi Germany.
[1] For some reason Wikipedians came to a consensus that only Chinese execution vans should be mentioned in the article titled "Execution vans".
I used to not really notice it because I actually agreed with the ideological slant of Wikipedia, but contact with other, non-English Wikipedias has seriously forced me to reconsider and now I don't trust any Wikipedia on politically charged content.
And yeah, in my mind Wikipedia has fallen from what it promised to be originally. It's so easy to slant the tone of an article by careful deletion; it's an assymetric battle against free exchange of information.
And some of those have been dissidents.
Organ harvesting for executed victims has happened in the past. Officially, the practice has ended but there is no way to verify.
China executes a lot of people.
True insofar as that goes, but the government isn't monolithic. At least, not entirely. Ministries do jockey for power among themselves, and the Ministry for Ecology and Environment has gained/consolidated responsibility and authority under Xi (somewhat similar to the formation of DHS in the US).
If you want a concrete example showing that this isn’t just propaganda, you can look into China’s reforestation effort, through which 66 billion trees have been planted since 1978 (enabling many at-risk species to bounce back).
Not sure why but they also have an English page:
It is one of the ministries under the State Council. Technically all Ministries are on the same Level so they enjoy equal power. In reality some ministries have more weights (e.g. NDRC apparently have more power than some of the smaller ones) and MEE has recently gained much more power since the elevation of President Xi. The following paragraph shows its power.
Quote in Chinese: 组建生态环境部。将环境保护部的职责，国家发展和改革委员会的应对气候变化和减排职责，国土资源部的监督防止地下水污染职责，水利部的编制水功能区划、排污口设置管理、流域水环境保护职责，农业部的监督指导农业面源污染治理职责，国家海洋局的海洋环境保护职责，国务院南水北调工程建设委员会办公室的南水北调工程项目区环境保护职责整合，组建生态环境部，作为国务院组成部门。生态环境部对外保留国家核安全局牌子。不再保留环境保护部。
Explanation: MEE took a lot of power from other ministries and departments:
0 - It originated from the Ministry of Environmental Protection
1 - The responsibility to tackle with climate change and reducing emmision (from NDRC)
2 - The responsibility to monitor underground water contaimnation (from Ministry of Land and Resources)
3 - A bunch of responsibilities regarding water pollution (from Ministry of Water Resources)
4 - The responsibility to guide argricultural pollution (from Ministry of Agriculture)
5 - The responsibility to protect ocean environment (from the State Oceanic Administration)
6 - The responsibility regarding environmental protection in South-to-North Water Diversion (from relevant officials)
But it's difficult to give a quatified answer as I'm not in the circle.
For example, there is national protected animals, protected under Wild Animal Conservation Law. http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?id=22418&lib=law Yangtz river protection law. One of the provision grants government power to ban fishing on yangtz and all of its tributary. Current ban is 10 years. http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/c23934/202103/8cccd3c25caf4... Regulations of the People's Republic of China on Nature Reserves， http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?id=12164&lib=law&Se... Law of the People's Republic of China on the Prevention and Control of Atmospheric Pollution http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?lib=law&id=1178&CGi...
also the constitution of the ccp, the top law within the party, says "The Communist Party of China shall lead the people in building a socialist ecological civilization. It shall strengthen the philosophy underlying ecological civilization that nature should be respected, adapted to, and protected; fully understand that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets; follow the fundamental national policy of conserving resources and protecting the environment; uphold the principle of prioritizing resource conservation and environmental protection and letting nature restore itself; and take a positive path to development that ensures increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems. The Party shall strive to build a resource-conserving, environmentally friendly society, implement the strictest possible environmental protection systems, and work to shape spatial layouts, industrial structures, modes of production, and ways of life that are conducive to resource conservation and environmental protection, creating good working and living environments for the people, and ensuring sustainable development for the Chinese nation." my interpretation is that the ccp is at least considering and not totally ignoring the environment. And if you look at banning fishing on the yangtz, transition fisherman to other jobs, pushing EVs, etc. I guess these things come from this principle.
I still remember the Baiji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiji or the finless porpoise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow-ridged_finless_porpoise . Can we realistically ever taper down and live more simple minimalistic lives that strike a better balance with our ecosystem?
Moreover does anyone know why the Wikipedia pages do not show the Baiji or Paddlefish animals extinct? Under the EW or EX status?
As far as why they're not listed as extinct yet, it's really hard to definitively say there are none left. It's a big river and while surveys haven't turned any up in a long while, it's possible there are individuals out there still. One of the species I sampled for hasn't been seen in the state's waterways for decades. The last stream it was seen in was ruined by the landowner and is no longer suitable habitat for the species. There's other streams with suitable habitat, however. If the species exists there and is prematurely declared extinct, the legal protections on those streams are gone and those fish will be gone within a few years for sure.
It's also kind of political. Maybe that fish is gone, but those streams harbor other species which need protection, but have not been listed as endangered yet. Species don't automatically get listed as protected. Someone has to care enough to gather the data and advocate for protection and listing as threatened or endangered. This can take years or decades and a lot of funding. One species listed in a disappearing habitat may also protect a half dozen or more bug species, plants, crustaceans, etc, which do not have the extensive data available or anyone focused on getting them protected.
Oh, and then someone also has to care enough to sue the entities that aren't going to abide by the Endangered Species Act until they get sued a couple times. I'm not exaggerating. My first reality check as far as how conservation really works was an internship surveying a very cute and popular (among bird people) species of bird. The woman I was working for spent a decent amount of her time taking businesses, land owners, and other sectors of the government to court for flagrant violations of the laws protecting the species.
And funding, don't forget funding. Those grants for the protection of that species are gone the second it's declared extinct and the biologists who rely on that funding to maintain species inventories in those areas can no longer afford to hire techs to slog through the middle of nowhere and inventory extant species.
Generally, the only people in a hurry to declare a species extinct are those who want the protections lifted on that habitat. Maybe it's a little dishonest to take so long declaring a species extinct. Honestly, even if there are 10 Yangtze paddlefish left out there, the species still isn't coming back. However, as far as environmental health is concerned, it is beneficial to drag that funding and protection out for as long as possible, even when the listed species is well beyond saving.
Submitters: please don't do that. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
something that was pointed out too me earlier was the two different titles associated with a page, are both acceptable to title a submission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_paddlefish (Psephurus gladius)
No. Thankfully reader mode can parse it at least.
were other posts around about it from smithsonian and phys.org at the time when this was news.
Why would you want to omit that part?
That said, this title is a poor attempt at communication.
The Chinese paddlefish, one of world's largest fish, has gone extinct *because of Yangtze dam*
Paddlefish, largest, from spawn, now extinctExample: I touched off a bit of a “seems bait-y” pas de deux/do-si-do with the bot/mods re a BBC headline a while back. It’s towards the bottom (where it surely belongs) of this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26552375
Though even there, it's... not great, as most people will probably read Yangtze dam as the Three Gorges Dam.
For reference when it inevitably gets changed, it’s currently “Yangtze dam separates Paddlefish, largest, from spawn, now extinct”.
Original title is:
The Chinese paddlefish, one of world's largest fish, has gone extinct
Subtitle is:
Native to China’s Yangtze River, these fish grew 23 feet in length, but haven’t been spotted since 2003.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
For titles, finding (or manufacturing) one that's clearer based on actual article text is a common alternative. I've suggested "Chinese paddlefish has gone extinct due to overfishing and dams" to the moderators. (Much of that phrase occurs within the article.)
What does this mean?
The saddest thing is that there are apparently technical solutions to this that could have potentially saved the species. The article mentions fish ladders and bypasses for dams. I'm not sure if the ladders are suitable for a huge fish like this, or whether it has the necessary jumping ability, but some sort of fish bypass seems like a good idea. Hopefully this can be implemented in the future for other similarly endangered species.
It wasn't inevitable, but now it's impossible to bring them back.
> Yangtze dam separated Paddlefish, largest (fish), from spawn; now extinct.
......nope still doesn't make sense.
The Gezhouba Dam generates 2.7 GW of carbon free power. In the light of the critical nature of climate change, we need to build more dams like it if we can. Even if a few species on the go go extinct, compared to the massive devastation that will happen from climate change, that is still preferable.
Climate change is an emergency, and we would be better off with more massive hydro-electric dams even at the cost of extinctions of species that might be native to the river on which it is built.
You first.