Realities of Baiji Conservation

We take issue with the assertion of Yang et al. (2006 (this issue)) that the baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) has been a conservation cause celebre over the last 15 years. There has been a lot of hand wringing, yes. Many of us have given lip service to the need for greater efforts (actually, any ef- fort) to improve the baiji's survival prospects. But there is precious little evidence of this vanishing creature's sup- posed celebrity. No large nongovernmental organization has campaigned forcefully or invested more than a pit- tance to the cause; most have simply looked the other way. For its part, the Chinese government seems to have weathered the occasional squall of international outrage over the baiji's imminent demise without making any seri- ous investment. To illustrate, workers at the Tian-e-Zhou reserve tell us that they need to open it to commercial fishing for a period each year to raise their own salaries. Also, the only existing budget for another baiji capture at- tempt consists of a grant from Japan. We see no sign of a major commitment on the part of China's central govern- ment. Finally, those of us who should have been hounding the bureaucrats and refusing to be stonewalled over the last 15 years have been doing a lousy job. Even now, we dither and keep looking for an elusive magic bullet. If the baiji truly had been a cause celebre before now, surely we would be a good deal farther along than we are in saving it from extinction. We do welcome the contribution by Yang and col- leagues. Such a call for plain talk and what those authors call "realism" is long overdue. None of the points they raise is new to the debate that has been occurring, al- beit by fits and starts, within a small group of cetacean conservation biologists for several decades. At its annual meeting in 2000, the Sub-committee on Small Cetaceans of the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission struggled to find a way forward but could not reach consensus on the main sticking point: whether, and exactly how, to proceed with an ex situ component to save the baiji (IWC 2001). The 2003 IUCN/SSC global action plan for cetacean conservation firmly endorsed an in situ approach and recommended that if ex situ efforts