This week, international negotiations are raging over a group of species that conservationists say are being pushed towards extinction. The cause of the problem: uncontrolled trade.

Votes are already coming in and the first big result is a NO VOTE on a potential ban trade in Bluefin Tuna. The trade will go on. Japan must be thrilled.

Inside a net with a shoal of doomed bluefin tuna. Photo by Marco Carè Marine Photobank

The plan – proposed by Monaco – had been to add the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna to appendix I of CITES – the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora.

Every two years, CITES members meet to decide which species should be added, removed, or upgraded on their lists that offer endangered animals and plants protection from international trade. Appendix I means a global trade ban. Appendix II means global regulation, aimed  to keep the trade well within sustainable limits.

If the tuna vote had been Yes, it would have put a halt – for now – on legal trade in Bluefins from the Atlantic. Who knows what the consequences might have been: the black market might have carried on supplying anyone who wanted sushi. A new breed of sushi tourism might have opened up in Mediterranean countries that catch Bluefins (this was going to be a ban on international trade, not on catching them).

But Japan, Canada and a number of poorer nations voted against the proposal. And so the trade will continue, and we’ve missed a chance to help make sure there will still be Bluefins cruising the Atlantic in years to come.

Bluefin in a cage. Photo by Marco Carè Marine Photobank

And this is all despite overwhelming evidence that there are now few enough of these fish left in the oceans to meet CITES’ stringent rules for a global trade ban.

Many claim that the tuna is being watched over by ICCAT – the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, so CITES isn’t needed. But perhaps a more appropriate acronym could be the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas.

ICCAT set annual catch limits based on scientific data. These are not low enough and are often exceeded.

If you want a balanced and thorough overview of the Bluefin situation, I urge you to have a read of IUCN and TRAFFIC’s review of the CITES proposal to ban the trade. They have crunched a huge volume of data and offer a neat summary of the whole deal.

There’s a small chance the Bluefin No vote will be overturned at the end of the meeting. But it doesn’t seem likely.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Bluefins turn up again in the next round of CITES discussions in 2 years time.

Meanwhile, there are other threatened marine species under the CITES spotlight this week. A group of shark species have been proposed for trade regulation – not ban – under CITES. They include Oceanic Whitetips and Hammerhead sharks, both heavily exploited for their fins.

Oceanic Whitetip Shark. Photo by Michael Aston

I’ll be watching especially closely, since I was involved in writing reviews of the CITES shark trade proposals.

I can only hope these opportunities to help protect ocean biodiversity won’t also be thrown away.

I welcomed in the new decade under a stunning blue moon here in Cambridge, and it’s got me to wondering whether the brand new year, and decade, that lie ahead of us might also be full of other rare and beautiful things.

2009 was undoubtedly the year when more people than ever before began paying attention to the problems of climate change. It was incredible to see these issues climb so high in the international agenda, even if the outcome might not yet be what most of us were hoping for.

But has all the talk about climate change distracted us from many of the other threats to the natural world?

Biodiversity – the wonderful diversity of wild species and the threats they face from human actions – is an issue that has been patiently waiting in the wings, waiting for the UN to push in out onto centre stage in 2010. Because this year is the UN International year of biodiversity.

The question is, will the dwindling populations of so many important, breathtaking, extraordinary species command as much global attention in 2010 as the climate change debate did in 2009.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky.

Coming up in the following months are a few major international meetings that could decide the fate of some of the world’s wildlife.

The international trade in bluefin tuna – highly prized for Japanese sushi – could be banned in March at the latest conference of CITES – the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Following the failure last November of management bodies to take bold steps to help stop these magnificent fish being hunted to extinction, CITES could be the bluefin tuna’s last hope. But will countries with a vested interest in the trade be prepared to vote for a ban? The pessimist in me says, not likely.

Bluefin tuna on sale in Tsukiji Market, Tokyo. Photo by Sanctu

Also on the agenda at the CITES meeting will be a group of sharks that conservationists fear are being driven towards extinction by demand for their meat and most notably their fins, to be made into the Asian delicacy sharks fin soup. I’ve been working for the last 6 weeks assessing the proposals to have hammerheads, oceanic whitetips, spiny dogfish and porbeagle sharks join a trio of awesome sharks that already have trade restrictions – the basking sharks, whale sharks and great white sharks.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by gnuru

I’ll be blogging more about sharks and tuna this year, so watch this space.

Then, November will see another landmark UN meeting and with it another opportunity to make global deals that could help secure the future of the planet, this time at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

Back at the Rio Earth summit in 1992 nations pledged to put a halt to the loss of biodiversity. And they were going to do it by 2010.

Everyone knows that this has not happened – no where near it. We are barely even starting to understand how human actions are affecting biodiversity, let alone figure out ways of stopping extinction.

So this meeting will be a tricky one, but could be vital if a way forward for global action against extinction is to be found.

But ultimately what I hope this coming year will do is help people appreciate why biodiversity matters, just like many people in 2009 began to realise why climate change matters.

The link between biodiversity loss and our own lives may not be as obvious as the threats from climate change, but there are so many ways in which we depend on healthy, diverse, functioning ecosystems. And that’s something else I’ll be writing about more this year.

For now, Happy New Year to you all. May 2010 be full of rare and beautiful things for us all.

This week an extract of my book Poseidon’s Steed was published in the Guardian, and the book is now available to buy in Europe from various online booksellers. So I thought it was time I blogged about my favourite fish.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is ‘Are seahorses endangered?’. And my answer is, sadly, yes they are.

Seahorses around the world are not only taken from the oceans (both deliberately and accidentally) in scarily high numbers, but they also suffer from the breakdown of their fragile habitats – especially coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves.

So, what can we do about it? Well, here are my top ten tips for doing your bit to save the seahorses:

1. Don’t buy dead seahorses

This may sound a little odd. Why would you want a dead seahorse?

Because they live inside a coat of bony plates – which take the place of a more conventional suit of fishy scales – seahorses maintain much of their delicate and intricate shape after they die.

Obviously, it’s not quite the same, but much of the seahorses’ beauty lives on after death and there is something to be said for having your very own magical seahorse sitting on your desk (I must admit I have one on my desk, in a little cardboard jewelry box, given to me by a friend who’d had it for years – it must be a long time dead).

Dead seahorse by luv life

But don’t forget it is just the dead body of a fish that once led a quiet, gentle life on the sea floor.

Picking up a dead seahorse from the beach isn’t so bad. But the ones on sale in seaside souvenir shops will almost certainly have been taken live from the sea. So please, don’t buy them. The seahorses will thank you.

2. Make sure your pets were born on a farm

Following the publication of an extract of my book in the Guardian, a few readers have commented that keeping endangered seahorses might not be such a good idea. Have a read of chapter 5 of the book and you’ll find details of modern seahorse farms where seahorses are being bred for the aquarium trade.

Baby seahorses. Photo by pixiesticks23♥ (real busy)

So these days there is no excuse. Anyone who wants to keep these cute animals at home can do so without taking them from a wild.

In the book I also go through some of the pros and cons of keeping seahorses: for you, for seahorses, and for the environment. It’s not up to me to say if people should or shouldn’t keep seahorses – although I can see how lovely it would be to have live, beautiful seahorses in my life every day.

But if you want to keep them, make sure you go to reputable suppliers. Or check out online forums: home aquarists are often giving away spare baby seahorses that were born in their tanks. And this doesn’t just apply to seahorses; always choose captive bred not wild critters for your tank.

3. Don’t buy seahorse medicines

Again, this might sound odd.

Especially to anyone who isn’t familiar with the popular practice in various countries of using seahorses as an ingredient in traditional medicines.

Traditional Chinese medicine texts dating back 500 years prescribed seahorses for all sorts of medical conditions from broken bones and bed wetting, to skin rashes and even a flagging libido. Global demand for seahorse medicines is a driving force behind a growing market in seahorses taken from the sea – at least 25 million of them every year.

Dead seahorses on sale in a medicine shop in Vietnam. Photo by Helen Scales.

Especially worrying is the growing popularity of pre-packaged, off-the-shelf seahorse medicines that use weeny, dark-coloured seahorses that traditional Chinese medicine doctors normally don’t bother with. This means that now any seahorse, no matter what size or colour, can now be used in traditional medicines.

So, if you do use traditional medicines and can afford to buy seahorses (they aren’t cheap), then think about engaging your compassion for the natural world and choose an alternative that doesn’t include endangered species. Because there are lots of alternatives.

4. Protect the seahorses’ world

All sorts of human activities threaten the shallow coastal habitats that seahorses call home including coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangroves, and estuaries. The list of problems is long and growing and includes pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, and ocean acidification.

And these are all things to worry about and take action over. Especially important is the creation of many more marine reserves or marine protected areas or marine parks or whatever you want to call them. Essentially these are places where the destructive influence of humankind is minimised, by banning fishing, extraction, direct input of pollutants and so on. Some strict marine reserves ban people altogether.

Healthy coral reef. Photo by Jiangang Luo Marine Photobank

There are obvioulsy problems that do not respect the boundaries of marine parks. But we know that protected habitats on the whole are healthier and can cope better when more insidious problems like climate change come along.

Currently less than 1% of the oceans are offered protection from human activities. That number needs to go up – a lot.

You may not have the power to set up your own marine reserve (who does?) but public support of local, regional, national and international campaigns to protect the oceans is vital for action.

5. Stamp out destructive fishing

A major threat to seahorses comes from trawl boats that plough through their habitat. Shrimp trawl boats don’t only catch shrimp but they also scrape up millions of seahorses every year (most seahorses made into traditional medicines are picked out of trawl nets), devastating their fragile habitats in the process. This insensitive, unselective form of fishing has to stop.

Trawl bycatch. Photo from Marine Conservation Cambodia/Marine Photobank

Do your bit by not buying fish that were caught in trawlers. How do you know, you cry? Well, you can ask. More and more these days, supermarkets and restaurants are giving customers information about how their fish is caught. If they don’t say and won’t tell you, then don’t buy.

Check out Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new Super Green List of fish that are good for you and not so bad for the oceans.

6. Take a stand against climate change

We may be releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere above our heads, but an awful lot of it ends up dissolved in the oceans where it’s already starting to wreak a particular brand of marine catastrophe. The oceans are becoming more acidic. And the seahorses – along with so many other marine creatures – are going to get hit hard, mainly because lots of them live in habitats that may soon be gone: coral reefs.

So don’t ignore the goings on in Copenhagan next month, because this really matters. Especially if you like the idea of a world with seahorses and coral reefs and other beautiful extraordinary wildlife.

And we can all do our bit to help. Switch off lights, turn down thermostats, insulate your house, recycle, drive less, fly less, ride your bike more. Get involved in campaigns like 350.org. And think of the seahorses while you do it.

7. Go see the seahorses

Aquariums around the world are home to thousands of seahorses and more of them than ever are bred in captivity and not taken from the wild (many aquariums swap baby seahorses when they have too many, which is often the case for the seahorses species that breed happily in tanks).

Seahorse and shrimp fish in an aquarium. Photo by Cal_gecko

Stop for a few minutes and watch the seahorses doing their seahorse thing, and let your thoughts wander off. When they come back, you’ll have your own personal seahorse moment to carry with you and remind you about these amazing creatures and the wild world they live in.

And have a read of the information boards at the aquarium. You never know what you might learn about the world of seahorses.

There’s a great new Secret Lives of Seahorses exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But fear not, if you aren’t in California there are seahorse exhibitions all over the place.

8. Go dive for seahorses

If you are an addict of the underwater world like me, then there are heaps of places to go see a seahorse. Well, you can try anyway: they are extremely tricky to spot, with their cunning camouflage and shy nature.

Plus they are naturally rare creatures. You’ll not spot a big herd of them galloping by, but maybe – if you’re lucky – you might catch sight of a solitary seahorse grasping onto a blade of seagrass or coral branch. (Although, a friend of mine has just been diving in Indonesia and swears she saw a sea fan covered in dozens of pygmy seahorses. I’m not sure if she wasn’t just suffering from a case of nitrogen narcosis).

And you don’t have to venture to the tropics to see seahorses. Contrary to popular belief, seahorses inhabit shallow seas along virtually every coastline, tropical and temperate (but they don’t like really cold, icy waters, so don’t bother looking there).

Me and a seahorse. Photo by Steve Trewhella 2009.

A few weeks ago, I saw my first British seahorse off the beach at Studland in Dorset. Yes, that’s right. A British seahorse. There are two species on our fare but chilly shores.

Divers can play an important role in proving that a seahorse is worth more in the water than out. So, go out and support dive operations that care about their local seahorses.

And if you do spy a seahorse, try not to hassle it, poke it, prod it, or blind it with camera flash.

In this picture I am holding onto Troy (or rather, he is holding on to me), but I must point out, I was diving with a licensed seahorse handler (the UK species are now protected). We were conducting a survey, taking down this guy’s vital statistics, and stopped just quickly for an unmissable photo opportunity!

Check out chapter 6 of Poseidons’ Steed for more seahorse spotting tips.

9. Send in your seahorse sightings

Do your bit for seahorse research by getting involved with local seahorse spotting projects. The British Seahorse Survey collects reports of seahorse sightings from across the British Isles – and that goes for live seahorses in the water and dead seahorses too.

Get your seahorse spotting reports in!

10. Spread the seahorse love

And finally… (as they say on the news)

Recycled cashmere seahorse by snaulkter

Raspberry seahorse by snaulkter

I recently discovered these gorgeous cuddly seahorses made from recycled materials by a brilliant artist/designer snaulkter.

They are simply the most adorable – and accurate – depictions of seahorse in fabric that I’ve seen (and trust me, over my years of being a seahorse fanatic friends have given me virtually every beanie baby and cuddly seahorse ever made!). And I love that they are made from reused fabrics. Perfect!

So go get the kids hooked on seahorses, or indulge a grown up’s passion. Each seahorse is a unique critter, and each one is beautiful. Go see for yourself…

So… there you have my top 10 suggestions of how to help save seahorses. I’d love to hear you thoughts of any other things we can do.

Tonight it was the turn of fish to take centre stage on the BBC’s Life. And what an episode it was… absolutely, by far the best yet.

Clown fish. When the head female of an anemone dies, the biggest male has a sex-change & becomes the new dominant female. Photo by ecatoncheires.

Honestly. Trust me. You have to see this one. The early episodes had moments of eyebrow-raising novelty and breathtaking beauty, but so far none of them have truly enthralled me from start to finish. Until now.

And yes, it was about fish, so I’m a bit biased. But really, if anything, I was more likely to say “seen it” to whatever the BBC marched out on my screen.

What we see is scene after scene of surprises, extraordinary behaviour, and frankly stunning spectacles. We have freshwater barbel fish picking the muck off herds of grateful hippos. I never knew this sort of thing went on. Cleaning wrasse and shrimp oncoral reefs, sure. But hippos? Really! The hippos even open up those lethal jaws of theirs and have themselves a fastidious tooth clean.

Then there are the gobies that use their lips to climb up vast, roaring Hawaiian waterfalls. A few of the bravest individuals make it to glorious mountainous pools – fishy heaven. Only, their babies get swept back down the waterfall and out to sea, and the whole, exhausting process starts over again.

There are gorgeous slow motion shots of flying fish. Seeing these guys in real life is such a treat and wierder than you can ever imagine. But why not? Some birds swim don’t they? So why shouldn’t fish take to the air?

But crazier still is when the flying fish start getting together to make more flying fish. On camera, they cast their prodigious eggs and sperm onto a floating palm frond (which I suspect the film crew put there): so much that some of the fish start getting stuck in it and die. Yuck!

Flying fish eggs as sushi. Apparently some people like to eat this stuff. Photo by Roger Jones.

Imagine if you will, that when these fish start getting it on, they can produce enough gametes to sink a boat! The “behind the lens” section at the end of the programme showed a worried captain heaving a massive lump of sticky orange fish goo off the deck after the fish started spawning on his boat. The film crew make a hasty exit. (Also catch the hilarious scenes where the flying fish fly right into the camera team on their little boat).

This episode was especially poingnant for me, because I might have been involved in filming it. I’m not disgruntled that I didn’t get a chance to hob-knob with BBC film crews (although that would I’m sure have been a blast). But I’m miserable because the fish I wanted to take the BBC to film have apparently all gone.

For my PhD I studied I huge species of coral reef fish called the Napoleon wrasse or humphead wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus).

A fully grown male Napoleon wrasse. Photo by bananeman.

These are probably the biggest bony fish that live on tropical reefs and can grow up to nearly 2m long – it would tricky fitting one in a bath tub.

In this episode of Life we see snappers spawning in huge aggregations (these particular aggregations in the Caribbean attract whale sharks who come to feed on the resulting egg soup). Napoleon wrasse do this too. Or at least they used to at a site in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea where I studied their spawning aggregations.

Every day when the aggregation formed, I went a long to film these giant fish. Then later on, back in Cambridge, I studied the footage and identified individual fish returning to the site day after day, recognising them from the unique patterns of scribbles and lines each one has on its face. Napoleon wrasse, as I discovered, come stamped with an individual faceprint.

Napoleon wrasse scribbles, like a human fingerprint. Photo by Peter Nangle.

Then, after I’d finished my PhD, a few years ago now (that’s how long it takes to film these series) I was contacted by a member of the Life team who suggested we go to the remote island where I did my PhD to film the spawning wrasse once again – this time with proper cameras, and not the sony handicam I used for my research.

It was all looking good until an email came through saying he’d heard that the wrasse were all gone: rumour had it that they’d been taken away to be sold in expensive Asian restaurants, another subject I studied for my PhD.

After following the intimate love lives of individual, gorgeous fish, my Napoleon wrasse have all gone.

Napoleon wrasse eye. Photo by tetzi.

So, all in all, I love this episode of Life. It reminds me why I do what I do. The oceans are beautiful and staggering and still, after all these years that I’ve got to know them, they can take my breath away.

But they also can make me very, very sad.

At least there were some beautiful dancing dragons to help cheer me up.

Oh, and how could I forget. They showed footage of a fish called the sarcastic fringehead. For real.

This week is European Shark Week run by the Shark Alliance.

The idea is to spread the word about the many species of shark, ray and chimera that live in European waters, and highlight the problems they are all facing.

The Save Our Seas Foundation is running a great blog throughout the week. Offerings over the weekend include the announcement by three major european supermarkets that they plan to stock only shark products from non-threatened species. It’s a step in the right direction, but how about not selling any sharks at all?

Shark fins without the bodies they came from. Jessica King/Marine Photobank.

Shark Week has just begun and already there is one piece of encouraging news for European sharks.

It’s been announced that shark finning will be affectively banned in the UK. The plan is to close a loophole in existing legislation by no-longer giving fishermen permits to bring back fins that have been separated from sharks at sea. Hopefully this will turn the pressure up on Spain and Portugal, the two main shark-finning nations in Europe, to do something similar.

So, do look out for more European shark news this week.

And you can spread the word a little further yourself by sending out  Shark Week e-cards to your friends (check out the theme music!).

That’s it. We can’t ignore this any longer. Coral reefs are in big, serious trouble. Not the sort of trouble that might spoil a few nice dive sites. This is the sort of trouble that could spell the end of all the world’s reefs within the next century. Yes, it could mean no more reefs.

So be warned. This is an unapologetically dismal post.

But please don’t take my word for it. I urge you to find half an hour to watch Professor Charlie Veron, veteran coral reef scientist, give a lecture on the past and future of the world’s coral reefs. Is the Barrier Reef on Death Row?

Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row? ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies/Marine Photobank

J.E.N. Veron, known as Charlie, is undoubtedly the world’s most well-respected coral taxonomist and biogeographer. His three-volume Corals of the World sits behind me, reminding me of the days I’ve spent conducting underwater coral surveys.

But lately he has become increasingly worried that those books could become history books. Now he spends his time researching and lecturing about the future of coral reefs. In particular ocean acidification, the ‘great big gorilla in the cupboard that is waiting for us’ as he put it.

Dead coral and live starfish. Wolcott Henry 2005/Marine Photobank

In his lecture Veron tells us about how reef extinction has happened before. Five times in fact. Each time, corals under various guises were hit hard, but each time reefs reinvented themselves and came back.

So why is this 6th extinction any different? I actually think he nails that question most eloquently in his recent paper The coral reef crisis.

Here, Veron and his co-authors succinctly explain that the rate of current (and near future) climate change is way faster than it ever has been in the past. This leaves little hope that corals will be able to adapt their way out of trouble. Even if they could, like they have in past, it would take thousands to millions of years for them to recover: that’s hardly relevant on a human time scale.

‘The difference is that this time humanity will have been the cause and also one of the species to suffer,’ they write.

Synergism

In both his lecture and paper, Veron explains the critical importance of multiple threats. Reefs today face a scrimmage of problems, not just rising sea levels, but rising acidification, rising temperatures triggering mass coral bleaching events, overfishing, poor water quality and bigger, more frequent storms (watch his lecture for more details on all of these).

Scientists have – until now – mostly studied how reefs deal with each of these issues in turn. But what happens when they all come along together?

Synergism. The combined effect will almost certainly be greater than the sum of the separate effects.

Bleached and healthy coral. (c) Wolcott Henry 2005/Marine Photobank

It’s an idea I wrote about in my masters thesis nearly a decade ago. Back then, there were hardly any studies focussing on how different stresses launch a combined assault on reefs. Now it’s something that people are having to think about more and more.

time to give up on reefs?

Veron doesn’t shirk his responsibility of delivering some really bad news. He outlines a series of increasingly spine-chilling scenarios. As CO2 levels ramp up from the current 387 ppm (parts per million in the atmsophere), first to 400, then 500 and 600, reefs will crumble and disappear.

By the time we reach 600 there won’t be any reefs left. And that could happen within 100 years.

Telling the story through the eyes of a moray eel he met on a recent dive on the Great Barrier Reef did little to take the edge off his apocalyptic message.

Unless we deal with carbon emissions, reefs are on their way out.

‘We must approach this as reality, not as a fairy tale’ Veron entreats.

That’s a message that has to get through at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December. If we could somehow manage to keep CO2 levels below 350 ppm, there is a chance reefs will survive.

So, please. Go make yourself a cup of tea and watch Charlie’s talk. And join the campain to save the world’s coral reefs. And when December comes round, you might like to listen in to what’s going on in Copenhagen.

Because this really matters.

p.s. why coral reefs matter

You may already know this, but just in case here are a few of the many reasons why reefs matter:

• They cover just 0.2% of the world’s marine environment and yet are home to around one third of all marine species.
• Approximately 500 million people live within 100km of a coral reef, many of them relying on reefs for food and income.
• Intact reefs protect coastlines.
• Reefs globally generate something like 170-375 billion dollars of income every year, in terms of food, tourism etc. That’s really just a good guess, and doesn’t count all the services that reefs provide that we can’t imagine replacing.

In detail

• The lecture: Charlie Veron gave this talk in July this year at the Royal Society, introduced by Sir David Attenborough.
• The paper: The coral reef crisis: The critical importance of <350 ppm CO2

Could this be the end of the Chinese paddlefish?

This extraordinary aquatic giant wasn’t seen once during an intensive 3-year survey of the upper Yangtze River in China.

The Chinese paddlefish. A fish no more?

The last official reported sighting of the Chinese paddlefish was back in 2003. So, have they all gone now?

This bizarre species looks (or at least it did) a lot like a sawfish (a close relative of sharks and rays) with a huge long saw-like snout, or rostrum.

Chinese paddlefish have been measured at 3m long, while unconfirmed reports claim a 7m (22 feet) specimen weighing half a ton was found (that’s longer than three very tall men lying head to foot). Maybe they do grow that big, maybe they don’t. We may never know.

Because sadly we may never know much about Chinese paddlefish. They remain tremendously illusive with very few details uncovered about their habits. But it is thought that they probably spent time both in the sea as well as in rivers.

Overfishing and habitat destruction are named as the main culprits behind the demise of the Chinese paddlefish.

There was a possible sighting reported in Chinese newspapers earlier this year. But even so, with a team of keen-eyed scientists making every effort to find one – and failing – in the stretch of river they were most likely to hang out in, there is little doubt that there are hardly any of these magnificent beasts left in the wild.

If there are a few still hiding from us, there can’t be many.

And there aren’t even any in captivity.

What to do? Wave farewell?

Does this make the Chinese paddlefish the next on the list of species we have witnessed vanish, hot on the heals of the its former river-mate the Yangtze River dolphin?

If so, is there really anything we can do about it?

Scientists are talking about trying breeding programs, even artificial parthenogenesis. If only they could find a single, live female. Decide for yourself whether or not you think we should go to such extreme lengths to stop a single doomed species from being pushed over the edge.

A tiny part of me clutches onto a sliver of hope that there will still be Chinese paddlefish in the world in years to come. Just like I refuse to believe that I will one day wake up to the news that there are no more tigers or black rhinos or Philippine mahogany trees or any of the other critically endangered species there are.

But I’m afraid the pessimist in me seems to be winning on this one. I can’t really see how there is much chance the Chinese paddlefish will be with us for much longer, if indeed there are any out there right now. There are so many pressures crashing down on these fish – and many others species that live in the Yangtze. I just think we might be too late.

Flip side?

Is there a positive side to look on? Well, maybe.

While there may be not much hope for this particular species, I think we all need to reflect deeply on the possibility of another species lost. Stand (in your mind) on the banks of the River Yangtze, peer into the murky waters, and bid farewell to another creature gone, another fabulous product of natural selection.

It seems we never learn from our mistakes. But perhaps the story of the Chinese paddlefish could be one more reason to change that.

Because we’ve really got the stop this from happening. And not just for individual, charismatic species that we can admire and relate to, but for all creatures, great and small (as we used to sing in primary school assemblies), the species we may never meet and those we rely on in ways we may never know.

2010 is the year we said we’d reverse the tide of species loss. We’ve obviously not quite managed that yet. But I don’t think it’s time to give up.

In Detail:

• The Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) is one of only two known paddlefish, the sole members of the family Polyodontidae. The other species, the Mississippi paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) lives, as you might imagine, in rivers of southern United States.
• Photo of a tiny juvenile Chinese paddlefish.
• Link to paper: Zhang et al 2009.