White river dolphin declared extinct after river search.

• Author: Herro, Alana
• Position: EYE ON EARTH

After scouring China's Yangtze River for six weeks, a team of international experts declared the baiji, a rare white river dolphin, "functionally extinct" in mid-December. August Pfluger, head of the Swiss-based baiji.org Foundation and a co-organizer of the expedition, told the New York Times, "We might have missed one or two animals but it won't survive in the wild. We are all incredibly sad." The baiji is the first large aquatic mammal to become extinct since the 1950s, when the over-hunted and over-fished Caribbean monk seal disappeared.

The team of 30 international scientists and crew used underwater microphones and high-tech optical equipment to search more than 1,600 kilometers of the Yangtze, the baiji's only known habitat. The nearly blind cetacean, which relies on its sonar abilities for navigation and foraging, survived some 20 million years as a species, but ultimately disappeared surprisingly fast, experts say. (As recently as the early 1980s, some 400 individuals were known to exist, and in 1997 there were 13 confirmed sightings.) "Some of us didn't want to believe that this would really happen," said search participant Randall Reeves, chairman of the Cetacean Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union (IUCN)...