When the dam was built, they didn’t know they were cutting off the fish from it’s only spawn point in the world (it was discovered later).
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.
Studying fish habits when building dams is an ancient practice.
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?
Perhaps because that title completely omits any form of attribution, which as the article suggests, is largely because of the Gezhouba Dam which completely cut paddlefish off from their only spawning grounds.
Why would you want to omit that part?
That said, this title is a poor attempt at communication.
HN’s hyperbole filter definitely takes out “world’s” on the first pass, but you can put it back.
Example: 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
My guess is that the title that the submitter originally suggested (with dam info that is not in the original title) was over the 80-character limit for HN titles, so they shortened it to the current existing (and confusing) title.
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.
Nothing; that's what the title should be. The guidelines ask you to use the original title, and not try to summarize the article yourself in the submission title.
the HN guidelines often lead to some stupid titles, but i think this is one of those times that show why the guidelines are good. The original headline accurately represents the content of the article. the edited version is an incomprehensible mess.
In great detail, over the better part of a decade, yes. You can find some of the rationale here and a few more searches will dig up more discussions about it than even an olympic-level messageboard-hardened person could possibly bear
HN has guidelines, not rules, and there are times when they can be bent.
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.)
I don't think we disagree. The important point is that it's not the job (or the privilege) of the submitter to determine for everyone else what the most important angle on the story is. Titles are community property. That's exactly what went wrong here.
Serious question here - not starting a flamewar. Are there any real organizations in China with power that protect the ecosystem and animals there? From an outsider it seems like they just build whatever they want without any concern for the environment they live in which ultimately will do significant damage to their own human population after the environment collapses and can't support them.
To be fair you haven't answered my question but stated that there are nascent efforts to preserve endangered fish after the damage is done. I don't doubt there are efforts however I refer to any arm of the government with real power or any institution that isn't related to the government with real power.
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.
The distinction you're applying seem to be arbitrary. What makes Chinese efforts nascent but American efforts (where species also continue to go extinct) developed?
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.
> What makes Chinese efforts nascent but American efforts (where species also continue to go extinct) developed?
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)
It's less about pointing out a failure in China and more about understanding.
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.
So I haven't actually said anything comparing US to China. I see you want to answer your own question unrelated to mine - which is alright.
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.
Given that I wasn't responding to your question, but to a follow up comment you made, I don't see why you would have expected me to be answering your original question.
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.
It happened in the US already in the same way it's happening in India and China now. The Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon, dozens or hundreds of native plants. Shoot, the entire ecosystem known as the Tallgrass Prarie is limited to a few pockets where it used to cover a large section of the Midwest.
> The article also talks that its not only happening in China these old paddlefish species are endangered all over the globe.
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.
Just last summer there was major flooding up and down the Yangtze. It used to be that lots of people died from these events, now that they have the river under control it's fine.
Calling it simply 'development' obscures the very real human benefits.
There's definitely more than one side to this issue. Do be aware that it isn't just this one species affected by this dam though. There are likely dozens or more other species that suffered the same fate. Some of them may not even have been known to science before they disappeared forever. Dams are extremely hard on fish populations. The real shame here though is that there are solutions available to mitigate the interruptions caused by damming rivers. It appears none were taken though.
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.
This is more or less what modern zoos do. They fund the conservation efforts using income generated from sales at the park. At the one here, the majority of animals aren't on display. They're maintained in the back areas for breeding, study, and conservation. There's breeding populations of native plants and beetles from the region as well as threatened species from around the world.
To call the Yangtze dam a "short term gain" is ... short sighted. Now, I can't speak to the effectiveness of the dam, but its goals and objectives were literally epic in scope. But to understand the goals, you have to understand the history, and that history stretches so far back that it merges with legend...
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.
They Chinese fishing fleet is also overfishing in international waters, so don't expect the CCP to care much about driving 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.
I am very aware of who runs China. Which is why I asked the question - are there any organizations within China that have any real power.
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.
There are no organizations in China that oppose the government openly. At least not for long. The Chinese government has roving vans that execute dissidents and harvest their organs right outside their house.
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.
I'm going to make you feel a bit more ill - contrary to the intro of the article, the PRC did not actually invent the mobile lethal injection van in 1997.
Oh wow, there's been heavy editing of that page since I last saw it. All references to the US's lethal injection vans removed for not being "relevant to the article".
Probably the fact that organ harvesting of executees was done in other countries too. But yes, Wikipedia as time goes on is not the best source for politically contentious content.
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.
Nah, it was that we in the US had lethal injection vans for a while for a lot of the same reasons as China. We transitioned to lethal injection because it was seen as more humane than hanging or firing squad, but our more rural jurisdictions didn't have the resources to retrofit their prisons on the time table that politics required, so instead would share "mobile lethal injection facilities" starting in the 80s.
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.
Yes, I meant that for example Taiwan has/had legal facilities to take organs from death row prisoners but that's not really mentioned. I agree with you on the rest.
It's technically true. When someone is sentenced to death in a remote area without the resources for an execution, a mobile execution van may be dispatched.
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.
> There are no organizations in China that oppose the government openly.
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).
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)
Back in the 90s and early 00s (when it was called the Ministry of Environmental Protection) economic development overweighted everything else so it didn't have a lot of power. Now the new Ministry have a lot more power and teeth.
But it's difficult to give a quatified answer as I'm not in the circle.
ccp, national people's congress, the political consultative conference, state state council orgs like Ministry of Ecology and Environment, have environmental researchers, experts and advocates. And throughout the years, they have advocated for ecosystem protection, clean environment (air, water, ground, etc), sustainable development etc.
I think this website have all of the environment related laws and regulations. https://www.mee.gov.cn/ywgz/fgbz/fl/
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 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?
One DNA sample isn’t enough. You need dozens or more to repopulate a species. If you just had one or two, you would have to rely on inbreeding to repopulate which would create too many bad genetic problems from bad genes.
There are numerous vertebrate species with only a few thousand (or fewer) extant members. Many have been greatly reduced over the 20th century, some have been on a long decline before that. Some have been small / relict / outlier populations for much or all of human history.
Whether this means the bottleneck hypothesis is overstated, or that we're looking at a tremendous number of bottlenecks, isn't clear.
The reproductive strategy of a species also matters. Species that produce hundreds or thousands of young (and then winnow down to the survivors) are better at quickly "breeding out" genetic flaws (if 50% of the young die, it's not a big deal), and have an easier time recovering from population bottlenecks.
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.
All that really means is that the offspring with bad genes might die sooner, but if population growth keeps up then eventually there'll be enough variety.
It seems like a poor HN title for a very interesting article (which has a perfectly serviceable actual title btw).
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.
They could even have been saved by a captive breeding program. Their American cousins are the subject of a lot of breeding programs. There's a number of state and federal hatcheries that capture breeding adults, strip the roe and milt, and return the adults to the wild. The fertilized eggs hatch into tiny paddle fish and they're raised in ponds until they're big enough to be released in the wild. The same is done with the pallid sturgeon, whose breeding habitat in the US is more or less destroyed due to the channelization of rivers for use by boats.
It wasn't inevitable, but now it's impossible to bring them back.
> This dam, which was constructed without a fish ladder or bypass, cut off the paddlefish from their only spawning grounds upstream, which had only been discovered in the late 1970s.
How effective are fish ladders? If they’re effective, shouldn’t we focus on building a fish ladder on all existing dams?
Fish ladders are minimally effective. They are typically installed to add a rubber stamp to dams and say "look, we tried! It's not our fault the ecosystem is getting destroyed". Same thing with fish breeding and release programs.
Thank you. The article notes that other pressures such as overfishing also contribute to the decline of fish populations, and that fish ladders on the Columbia river are successful.
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.
Well these fish were very large. I cannot imagine what a fish ladder would look like. There is one for salmon where I live and it is not that big. They have been trying to bring salmon back for over 30 years. Not much luck so far.
I recall visiting the Yangtze river by boat tour around 1997. This was before the dam was built and the place was beautiful. Imagine the grand canyon but it was covered with lush vegetation. We visited a center where there were models of the three gorges dam would soon to be built. On the tour they said we would be the last tourists to see the Yangtze as it stands, after the dam, many landmarks/settlements would be flooded, and even back then people critiqued how many species of fish would die because they can no longer swim up river to spawn.
Peter Hessler writes about his experience in Sichuan during the time the three gorges dam was being built [1]. Many people have had to sacrifice a lot for these dams. However, IIRC many receive some form of compensation from the government (adequate or not).
Sturgeon itself does not need to get any compensation, it is not human, no human rights.
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.
Yes these are separate dams. However, they both have similar effects - flooding of large areas, relocation of people, extinction of species / loss of historical artifacts.
But there is also significant benefits to these dams. Three gorges dam generates 95 TWh annually. My quick google search shows Finland consumes 82 TWH annually. This amount of energy is generated with no emission of co2. China has no oil and gas, hence if its not for these dams, most of this energy will be generated with coal. How much co2, so2, other particular matter will that generate? How much damage will that have on people's health? How many people will get health problems from that? I was in China in the 90s, I remember how scarce electricity was back then. ACs, heating, home appliances, industrial development, hospitals all require electricity. Without this power, people's lives and economy will not develop. How many people will die of poverty (poverty induces health problems from starvation and malnutrition, poverty causes crime, family and social issues). These dams are also crucial for irrigation. The mass famine in the 60s, one of the core issues is lack of agricultural development and irrigation is crucial for that. Another crucial aspect is flood control. These days significant lives and economic disruptions are avoided because of the extensive set of dams to control flood water. The Yangtze River flood of 1998 resulted total loss of 4150 people, and 180 million people were affected. Around 100,000 square kilometres (25,000,000 acres) were evacuated, and 13.3 million houses were damaged or destroyed. A similar size flood season occurred in 2020 and 2016, the damage resulted was much smaller. You cannot simply ignore all these benefits.
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...
For those wanting to get an idea of what that means, there is an episode of that institute of of science documentaries, BBC Horizon, that covers the flooding of Zeugma.
Which doesn't matter at all: it's not like the dam wouldn't have been built if there was no Bitcoin, so the implied causal connection is extremely tenuous.
Especially since the Three Gorges Dam predates Bitcoin by 2 or 3 decades.
bizzare comment. I don't believe for a second the op decided to imply a connection, nor that any single reader would take that away from reading the comment. They were simply highlighting the relative magnitudes of power using something that us techies are likely to be familliar with, and something that is in the public conciousness recently (the power consumption of bitcoin)
Overall, I learned that the dam has an impressively high power production, nothing more.
After reading HN voraciously for the past years, I though Chinese ecological protections and records were flawless, and the dam was a sign of prosperity, jobs, opportunities and freedom to the Chinese people.
Yes, that was bad. Submitted title was "Yangtze dam separates Paddlefish, largest, from spawn, now extinct". That spawned a whole school of complaints and offtopicness in its own right. We've changed it now.
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...
That's weird... I think the original title of the article was wordier than mine, so i cut out words to fit the limit. But now when i check the article it has a shorter one. I could be wrong tho, but I'm pretty sure that's what i remember seeing....
Oh - it's not uncommon for articles at big media sites to change their headlines. I don't remember seeing that at NatGeo before though. Sorry for the misunderstanding!
one of my own personal habits is to include the full non truncated title in a comment if the title is too long, this would also demonstrate the title at time of submission, so this would also make it evident that the title has been changed by the site operator.
something that was pointed out too me earlier was the two different titles associated with a page, are both acceptable to title a submission.
> survived unimaginable changes and upheavals, such as the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs that it swam alongside.
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?
there is a framing and context that comes from massive consumption of biological science.
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
>>The minimal superficial changes to living fossils are mistakenly declared the absence of evolution, but they are examples of stabilizing selection, which is an evolutionary process—and perhaps the dominant process of morphological evolution.[4]<<
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.
Damn, from worshipped to wiped out in a human lifetime. That's a shame.
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.
I had never heard of the California vaquita. Google revealed:
"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."
Its cousin, the American paddlefish, is still around, though it's vulnerable.
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]"
Fishing is highly...and I do mean highly regulated in Montana (spawning grounds).
http://fieldguide.mt.gov/speciesDetail.aspx?elcode=AFCAB0101...
There are wildlife biologists that harvest the eggs and process the meat for you. You must apply for tags and the season can be shutdown if a limit is reached before the end of the season. I fished it once and was glad I didn't catch anything. My heart wasn't in it after I saw the first one caught. They reminded me too much of dolphins and they have to be snagged. They do not take bait so the fish...imo is not brought in as quickly and humanely as I was comfortable with. We hunted and fished because without it quality protein was scarce during my childhood. It was a creature I just chose to appreciate and eat more mac and cheese.
This is going to come off much snarkier than I mean it, but were rice and beans not available in Montana at that time? I am a big fan of seafood but there is a lot of "quality protein" middle ground between meat and mac and cheese.
:). Yeah there were. "Mac and cheese" is a fillin for ramen, rice, beans, ketchup and tortillas, and whatever leftovers I could scrounge from friends and take home from washing dishes in the cafeteria.
> Furthermore, activities like fishing and dam construction deserve more scrutiny
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.
(I'm not American so don't really have a horse to grind or axe in this race, but) why would an American working in manufacturing want American manufacturing to decline? Or do I misunderstand?
Specifically, not all manufacturing processes have moved to China as I understand it, just the ones that tend to be made more problemmatic due to labor cost/environmental controls as far as I'm aware. I'm a bit out of date on my scratching the surface of that industry, but my understanding was things like NAFTA and regulatory requirements tend to lead to an absolute minimum level of parts (I'm bundling in resource extraction and processing into fabrication, which technically, I shouldn't be, that's supply chain management from the manufacturer's perspective) fabrication being done in the U.S., with the main focus being final assembly (read: relatively unskilled or labor conducive to being automated). The rest below a particular fraction needed to claim "made in USA", and thus avoiding some sort of import duty liability or some such. Some places like Boeing make sweetheart deals with suppliers internationally to gain political capital and better treatment incentivewise; other places just run after the cheapest source they can get away with (without robust attention paid to QC from the horror stories I've heard).
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.
From an economic perspective the biggest losers of the dollar standard is manufacturing and the biggest winners is wall street. Wall Street had secular growth and manufacturing had secular decline from the adoption of the petrodollar and the dollar becoming the reserve currency of the world. Similar changes happened in Europe when the pound became a reserve currency (growth of Germany etc in manufacturing) and then the issues that surrounded relative decline in the City as a financial center till the Big Bang in the 1980s.
Reserve currencies create huge beneficiaries and losers (especially in “tradables” like manufacturing).
Interestingly there is a term for the last known member of a species: Endling [1]. Scrolling through that Wikipedia article always gives me an eerie feeling. It looks like the Chinese paddlefish is not listed yet though.
Last time similar topic came up (either here or reddit), someone posted this recording of a ”Kauaʻi ʻōʻō” bird [1] in which a male, apparently the last of its species, is trying to connect with a female. Reeally eerie.
It seems like a tremendously difficult task to declare that a particular individual is an endling. Do you know how a zoologist would infer such a thing?
Only a guess, but if there is no sighting of it in the wild for a very long time (eg. from the article it was 10 years, but I guess it depends on species, how long does it live, how many offsprings it produces etc) and there is one living in captivity it is not that hard to declare.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_bifurcation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder
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?
Why would you want to omit that part?
That said, this title is a poor attempt at communication.
Example: 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.)
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).
http://www.mee.gov.cn/
Not sure why but they also have an English page:
http://english.mee.gov.cn/
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paddlefish_Polyodon_spath...
from here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddlefish
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
[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.
https://youtu.be/fnY8ATNVYgw
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?
What went wrong?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
re:[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26638804]
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endling
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRY0CmcYNU
[1] https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/e...