Living Fossil Extinct
This is sad:
For 20 million years, the white-fin dolphin, or baiji, swam China’s longest river, the Yangtze. But a few years of breakneck development, overfishing and a massive increase in shipping have reduced sightings of this shy, graceful creature to zero.
A recent expedition failed to spot a single Lipotes vexillifer, and now conservationists fear the almost-blind, long-beaked animal is gone for good, the first big aquatic mammal to become extinct due to human activity.
“We have to accept the fact that the baiji is extinct. It is a tragedy, a loss not only for China, but for the entire world,” said the joint leader of the expedition, August Pfluger, an economist who runs the Swiss-based baiji.org, an environmental group dedicated to saving the dolphins.
. . . .
The white-fin dolphin is top of food chain in the Yangtze and has no natural enemies, except for man. The Yangtze is also China’s busiest waterway, and the baiji shared the river with huge ships, tugboats and fishing boats.
Experts describe the white-fin dolphin, which is native to China, as a living fossil as it has not changed in appearance since it first entered the Yangtze from the sea.
I hereby solicit your haiku memorializing the occasion.
I had a girlfriend
whose mouth looked like that. She did
not do well with head.
Chinese dolphins gone,
More fishy spring roll anyone?
So sorry Charrie….
Chinese dolphins gone,
More fishy spring rolls anyone?
So sorry Charrie..
sorry for the double posting..my posts didn’t appear at the bottom where I expected them too….
The thousandth, (or ten-thousandth, or millionth), to become extinct because it couldn’t quite cut it in “the delicate balance of nature”*
*Two words that don’t belong in the same sentence as nature. “Delicate” and “Balance”
Baiju Can’t Cut it
Greenie cry crocodile tears
Greenie blame Bush
o river dolphin
chinese red commie dolphin
adapt or so long
The article’s wrong when it says:
There’s an extinct, large manatee cousin, too.
Penis faced fishy
Well, really a mammal, extinct
you made my lunch resound
That communism
sure does a great job with the
environment, eh?
Now if we could get the Chinese to pull the same stunt with the PaleoSwine life would be better…
Are you quite sure, Dan?
Just checked the Senate website;
Robert Byrd’s alive.
“‘survival of the fitest’ as philosophy”—a Vogon haiku regarding our demolition of planet earth for the building of the new hyperspatial express.
—
For want of some fish
Humans wipe out a species.
You think us mean?
—
Alpha Centauri
Is only round the corner
Like, how far is that?
—
… and thanks for all the fish?
Chinese kill dolphins
Dan wants Japanese poems
Ching chong, racist pig!
This is why we need
Better government control
Over our planet
(Sorry–Farmer Joe kind of beat me to this one.)
What JohnAnnArbor said.
Also, this is wrong:
The beastie was almost certainly not eyeless when its sea-going ancestors first adopted the riverine lifestyle. That came later.
Oh, River Princess!
Living Fossil Appearance
Watching on “The View”
Sad River Princess
Riverine Romance But Now
Dodo of the Deep
Sorrow She is Gone
Chinese Dolphin Mystery
I am blue Baiju
I hear The Starship, Enterprise, got most of them.
Now, what will be a real loss is if the Appalachian Purdymouth Dolphin goes extinct.
Endorphins feel good
But these are sorry mammals
End dolphins is bad
I hate to quibble (really I do!), but none of these are haiku, but really senryu, since the seasonal reference is missing in all of them.
Let’s see…
Darkness takes baiji
stay in the ocean next time
winter will not wait
Chinese lose Baiji
Anti spam machine scares me
T.W. Death78
It also contains a special season word (the kigo) representative of the season in which the renga is set, or a reference to the natural world.
nobody outpedants me..
Matt:
I have a seasonal reference in mine.”Spring” roll.
Mine was intended as a senry thingie from the beginning. I’m not Dan’s bitch! I do what I wan!
That’s fine, Robert. Limericks, ballads, lyric poems of all descriptions, villanelles, free verse, odes, rondeaus, epics, romances, concrete poems, etc, all gratefully accepted.
Seasonal reference eh?
I can understand that there is no Baiji season, and in some places there’s no Crocodile season, but surely there’s still a Greenie season.
Oh well, if you want to play hardball:
Gaiji change too much
Winter comes for fragile niche
So? What’s the porpoise?
I think this is sad
Dinner will not be the same
They were delicious
Has anyone stopped to ask the members of this expedition about their methodology?
Methodology?
Nobody bothered to ask;
Baiji not talking.
baiji.org is
404 page not found here
neither is baiji.
Flipper from the land in the middle,
Found existence to be quite a riddle.
Twixt fishing old loners,
And gents wanting boners,
He received a very bad diddle.
All the white dolphins from China,
Passed from cancer, the flu, and angina.
Now you just see ‘em
Stuffed in a museum
In San Diego, “the whale’s vagina.”
Wait, you said limericks, right?
Actually, “outpedants” is not a word.
Blind Dolphin Dead
Don’t care as long as I get head….
Sadly. I will never taste
succulent Yangze River dolphin
Please pass the whale.
It’s not a tragedy for China. China doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
There once was a Chink-ishy mammal
with a dick-mouth, and a cunt on its head
It now leaves Chink sewers untrammeled
Cuz it’s really, most truly, most dead.
I am delighted by the haiku/limericks, even if in terms of extinction it is gallows humor. If you care about the extinction of the river dolphin, let me refer you to Douglas Adams’ “Last Chance to See.”It’s funny—think of him trying to explain to a Chinese pharmacist why he needed a condom for his microphone to record the dying gasps of the last river dolphin. But in terms of extinction, it’s not funny at all.
How can you say that….?