De Baiji, aka Yangtze-dolfijn, is uitgestorven

In de drukke rivier de Yangtze leefden duizenden zoetwaterdolfijnen, maar hun aantal nam sinds 1950 snel af. Science-fictionschrijver Douglas Adams reisde in 1989 met zooloog Mark Carwardine af naar China om de dolfijn te spotten voor hun radioserie en boek "Last Chance to See". Zij hingen een met een oude BBC-techniek waterdicht gemaakte microfoon in de rivier en concludeerden dat de sonar van de dolfijnen compleet overstemd moest zijn. In de 'meer'-sectie vind je een stukje uit hun hilarische boek over deze treurige situatie. Vorig jaar leefden er nog vijf in gevangenschap. Dat is te weinig om mee te fokken en daarom werd er intensief gezocht naar in het wild levende beesten. Ze zijn niet meer gevonden.

“Travelling in China I began to find that it was the sounds I was hearing that confused and disoriented me most.
It occurred to me, as we tried to find a table in one of the more muffled corners of the bar, that the dolphins we had come to look for must be suffering from the same kind of problem. Their senses must be completely overwhelmed and confused.
To begin with, the baiji dolphin is half-blind.
The reason for this is that there is nothing to see in the Yangtze. The water is so muddy now that visibility is not much more than a few centimetres, and as a result the baiji's eyes have atrophied through disuse.
(...)
As a consequence, the baiji had to use a different sense to find its way around. It relies on sound. It has incredibly acute hearing, and 'sees' by echolocation, emitting sequences of tiny clicks and listening for the echoes. It also communicates with other baijis by making whistling noises.
Since man invented the engine, the baiji's river world must have become a complete nightmare.
(...)
I said to Mark, 'It must be continuous bedlam under the water.'
'What?'
'I said, it's hard enough for us to talk in here with this band going on, but it must be continuous bedlam under the water.'
`Is that what you've been sitting here thinking all this time?
'Yes.'
`I thought you'd been quiet.'
'I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a blind man trying to live in a discotheque. Or several competing discotheques.'
`Well, it's worse than that, isn't it? Mark said. 'Dolphins rely on sound to see with.'
'All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.'
'Why?'
'All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you'd become completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.'
`Well, that's exactly what's happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen's nets. A dolphin's echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can't tell that it's about to be brained by a boat.
`Then, of course, there's all the sewage, the chemical and industrial waste and artificial fertiliser that's being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish.'
`So,' I said, 'what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head and the food is bad?'
'I think I'd complain to the management.'
'They can't.'
'No. They have to wait for the management to notice.'

A little later I suggested that, as representatives of the management so to speak, perhaps we ought to try to hear what the Yangtze actually sounded like under the surface - to record it in fact. Unfortunately, since we'd only just thought of it, we didn't have an underwater microphone with us.
'Well, there's one thing we can do,' said Chris. 'There's a standard technique in the BBC for waterproofing a microphone in an emergency. What you do is you get the microphone and you stuff it inside a condom. Either of you got any condoms with you?'
'Er, no.'
'Nothing lurking in your sponge bags??
'No.
'Well, we'd better go shopping, then.'
(...)

The microphone still would not sink into the thick brown water until we weighted it down with my hotel room key from Beijing, which I discovered inadvertently about my person. The microphone, wrapped in its condom, settled into the depths and Chris started to record.
Boat after boat crawled thunderously past us up the river. They were mostly twenty or thirty-foot, soot-black junks, whose small crews regarded us sometimes with perplexed curiosity and sometimes not at all. At the back of each junk an aged diesel engine juddered and bellowed as it poured black clouds into the air and drove the screw beneath the water.
After we had been on the deck a few minutes, a member of the ferry's crew suddenly arrived and expressed surprise at seeing us there. We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question `What the hell do you think you're doing?' has a familiar ring in any language.
The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway. At last Chris hauled the apparatus up out of the water, dried it off and showed it to him. As soon as the crewman recognised that it was a condom we had been dangling in the water it seemed as if some light dawned.
'Ah!' he said. `Ficky ficky!' He grinned happily and plunged his forefinger in and out of his other fist. `Ficky ficky!'
`Yes,' we agreed. `Ficky ficky.'
Pleased that all was clear now, he wandered off and left us to it as, each in turn, we listened to the tape over headphones.
The sound we heard wasn't exactly what I had expected. Water is a very good medium for the propagation of sound and I had expected to hear clearly the heavy, pounding reverberations of each of the boats that had gone thundering by us as we stood on the deck. But water transmits sound even better than that, and what we were hearing was everything that was happening in the Yangtze for many, many miles around, jumbled cacophonously together.Instead of hearing the roar of each individual ship's propeller, what we heard was a sustained shrieking blast of pure white noise, in which nothing could be distinguished at all.
(... ...)

After the radio series had been broadcast, we received a disturbing letter from a couple who had been working in China:

Dear Douglas and Mark,
We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme - but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing. We had a wonderful time with the people and ate well. To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze dolphin, so really there should be 201.
Sorry about that.

Yours,

PS Sorry, it was two dolphins - my husband reminds me that he was guest of honour and had the embryo.”

gepost door behanger op 01-12-2006 om 11:23 | via | 14 reacties | 6 |

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kortom, bij de uitreiking van de Darwin award kwam niemand opdagen

lulde trekpet

op 01-12-2006 11:42:15 | # | 0 |

So long and thanks for all the fish, dus.

lulde Blues

op 01-12-2006 11:54:13 | # | 2 |

Hm, ik wacht wel op de film.

lulde Gilles

op 01-12-2006 11:57:13 | # | -1 |

'So long and thanks for all the fish, dus.' Precies, niet uitgestorven, maar vertrokken.

Jezus wat een tragisch stukje eigenlijk, uitgestorven of vertrokken, weg is weg.

En Douglas ook al. En die film was waardeloos. En dat boek heb ik nou toch echt 42 x gelezen. Ook weg. WHAAAAAHHH!!!

lulde bebop

op 01-12-2006 12:15:00 | # | -2 |

Sambal bij?

lulde Apenkoning

op 01-12-2006 12:21:04 | # | 0 |

Van de hele groep van walvissen en dolfijnen is dit de eerste die vertrekt.

lulde behanger

op 01-12-2006 12:36:06 | # | 0 |

nog 25.999 te gaan!

lulde Joid

op 01-12-2006 12:58:01 | # | 0 |

Je wilt zeggen dat dolfijnen voor vluchtelingen model staan Joid? /seth

lulde behanger

op 01-12-2006 13:00:35 | # | 0 |

26.000 modellen trek ik niet Behanger
/seth

Er zijn grenzen!
/rita

lulde Joid

op 01-12-2006 13:09:35 | # | 0 |

[zeitgeist] EN WAAR IS DIE PARTIJ VOOR DE DIEREN DAN HE?! HYPOCRIETE PARTIJ HOOR! HEBBEN ZE ZETELS, DOEN ZE NIKS HOOR, LINKS LULLEN, RECHTS ZAKKEN VULLEN! NEDERLAND GAAT NAAR DE KLOTE! BEDANKT SP STEMMERS! [/zeitgeist]

lulde Biefstuk

op 01-12-2006 16:20:13 | # | 2 |

LOL

lulde Apenkoning

op 01-12-2006 16:23:02 | # | -1 |

Een van de beste boeken van Adams, en een van de beste delen van het boek...
Nu is het dus Too late to see

lulde sjofels de pofels

op 01-12-2006 18:37:47 | # | 0 |

lulde ikiro

op 01-12-2006 21:04:46 | # | 1 |

Die dolfijn staat niet op mijn lijst met favoriete avondeten.
So I can't be bothered.

(overigens ook niet op die betreffende het ontbijt en middageten)

lulde Einstein!

op 02-12-2006 13:25:18 | # | 0 |

>^v<

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De Baiji, aka Yangtze-dolfijn, is uitgestorven