One of the other great threats to the dolphin, as well as to its Yangtze cousin, the finless porpoise -- which is set to join the baiji at the end of this year on the list of critically endangered species -- is China's Three Gorges dam, the world's largest.
According to Zhang Xianfeng, director of research at the Institute of Hydrobiology, the dam's massive sluice gates have changed the Yangtze's natural water flows thus impacting biodiversity, probably forever.
The confluence of these factors cut the number of baiji -- identifiable by its long, teeth-filled jaw -- from about 400 in 1984 to fewer than 100 a decade later.
The last time scientists saw the animal in the wild was more than two years ago. The last confirmed count in 1997, done by naked eye, recorded just 13.
Leigh Barrett, one of baiji.org's project managers, described searching for the animal she has never seen alive as a little like "believing in the tooth fairy".
If the goddess of the river, as the baiji is called in ancient Chinese mythology, has vanished, it will mean the loss of a mammalian evolutionary line believed to have begun 25 million years ago -- or about 20 million years before man.
RSS