Word: rivering
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...Nicknamed the "goddess of the Yangtze," and long considered auspicious by fishermen, the pale-colored, human-sized dolphins have always been rare: a 1997 survey recorded only 14 left in the river. (A captive dolphin died of old age in a Chinese zoo in 2002). But Pfluger says human pressure pushed the baiji past the tipping point. "The main reason is overfishing. The Chinese still use unsustainable fishing methods like dynamite. There's still a lot of illegal fishing, so the dolphins were competing with humans for food...
...According to Wang Ding, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology and a leading expert on the baiji, damming on the river and noise from heavy boat traffic may have disoriented the dolphins, which are mostly blind and search for food in the sandy shallows using sonar. The confused and starving animals may then have wandered into boat propellers. Heavy dredging in shipping channels could also have made it harder for the animals to locate each other and hunt for increasingly scarce fish. "Dredging is a very serious problem," Wang says. "It destroys spawning grounds of fish. There...
...health of an ecosystem. Their disappearance bodes ill for the Yangtze, which supports more than 400 million people, roughly 6% of the world's total population. Wang says the Yangtze is relatively unpolluted. But untrammeled commerce and massive hydrological projects like the Three Gorges Dam have dramatically altered the river's landscape. With as many as 60 boats per km of river in some areas, the Yangtze already looks less like a river than a highway during rush hour. "Baiji are at the top of the food chain just like human beings," Wang says. "If the river can't support...
...Indeed, baiji aren't the only animal facing extinction. Wang says the finless porpoise, another large cetacean native to the river, has also seen its population plummet because of shipping and hydrological engineering. When Wang surveyed the river in the early 1990s, he found about 1,200 of the porpoises; 15 years later, there were fewer than half that number left. But Wang says it may not be too late to save the species. Galvanized in part by the baiji's disappearance, Chinese scientists are taking aggressive steps to rescue the finless porpoise, including breeding the animals in a lake...
...Army Corps of Engineers started draining and diverting it in the mid-20th century, trashing eons of delicate natural plumbing to make way for Florida sugar farms and ranch houses. Only in 2000 did the Florida and federal governments finally seem to acknowledge that the 18,000-square-mile "River of Grass" was not a swamp but a unique and vital ecosystem. They embarked on a $10 billion, 20-year project to restore the Everglades to something like its original state...