By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 9, 1997; Page A16

WUHAN, China—Once the mighty Yangtze River was the playground of thousands of Chinese river dolphins. These days, the river is their graveyard.

The graceful, long-nosed, white-bellied dolphin -- once revered as a horse that could gallop across lakes and rivers carrying divinities on its back -- has been impaled on grappling hooks, strangled in fishing nets, choked on pollution, blown up by river dredging explosions and chopped up by boat propellers.

Today the Chinese river dolphin -- which the Chinese call the baiji -- swims on the brink of extinction, another casualty in mankind's long march toward economic development. Experts estimate that there may be fewer than 100 of the Chinese white river dolphins left, making it one of the world's most endangered species. And soon, if it lives that long, the baiji will face another challenge in its battle for survival: Construction of the giant Three Gorges Dam will alter the water temperature, flood patterns and feeding grounds of the rare fresh-water dolphin.

"The baiji appears to be in such bad shape that it would probably take nothing short of a miracle to save it," said Thomas Jefferson, an expert on river dolphins at Hong Kong's Ocean Park Conservation Foundation.

That is why there will be no calls to free Qiqi, a male river dolphin in captivity on the edge of this industrial city on the Yangtze River. Eighteen years ago, Qiqi nearly became a victim of the dolphin's clash with humanity. After being impaled on a fishing hook, he was saved and nursed to health in captivity.

Today, the 275-pound dolphin lives in a tank of water 30 feet in diameter and survives on a daily diet of about 20 pounds of carp tossed to him from a bucket. For entertainment, he plays with a round life buoy. Otherwise, he glides through the water, spinning gracefully to show his white underbelly and occasionally giving short, strong kicks of his tail that send waves rippling along the tiles that form the frontier of his now shrunken world.

Unlike the panda, which has attracted international attention and environmental campaigners, the Chinese river dolphin has been hurtling toward extinction with barely any notice.

"You can go to the zoo and see the panda, but you can't see a white dolphin in a zoo, so no one knows about them," said Chen Daoquan, senior engineer at the Institute of Hydrobiology at the Department of River Dolphin Research. "It is more difficult to protect river and sea animals; you don't know where they are. A mountain can be made into a national reserve, but you can't block [boat traffic on] the Yangtze River."

It was not always like this. A natural history book written during the Han Dynasty 22 centuries ago reported that the middle and lower reaches of China's Yangtze River were teeming with dolphins. A variety of myths grew up about the dolphin, including one that said it was the reincarnation of a beautiful princess who drowned in the swollen waters of the river. Fishermen used the dolphins as harbingers of rough weather. As late as the 1950s, researchers estimated that there were still about 6,000 living in the river.

The Chinese river dolphin's scientific name is Lipotes vexillifer, which means "the flag bearer who was left behind," a reference to the mammal's whitish dorsal fin, which resembles a flag on the surface of the water. It is unusual because it is a fresh-water dolphin -- one of only five river dolphin species in the world. The others are in the Ganges and Indus rivers in Asia and in the Amazon River and coastal waters of eastern South America.

"The baiji is very similar to ancestral river dolphins, and may hold many evolutionary secrets that we have not yet discovered," researcher Jefferson said.

The Chinese river dolphins possess long snouts suited to searching for food in the river bed. They are nearly eight feet long when fully grown. Their fins conceal a complex bone structure similar to the human hand. Because their eyes were not useful in the muddy river, they have evolved to a point where they are almost blind and rely instead on highly developed sonar to orient themselves.

The last of those traits makes the baiji particularly unsuited to modern life. The Yangtze River basin has become home to 400 million people and the river has become one of China's main thoroughfares. Navigation on the river more than doubled between 1983 and 1994 as China's economy and tourist industry grew. That has posed a particular peril to the sonar-dependent baiji. The noise from boats has deafened -- and effectively blinded -- them.

Henry Genthe, a river dolphin expert at the Ocean Park Conservation Foundation, made an expedition to China in 1988 and saw five baiji in five days on the Yangtze River. But in 1995 he joined an expedition of 65 fishermen and scientists in a dozen fishing boats and two research vessels for six weeks, and saw only three. "It was sad and distressing to see that the baiji was disappearing from the Earth before our eyes," he said.

The prospects for saving the dolphin seem particularly dim because mating is so difficult. It takes six to eight years for a dolphin to reach sexual maturity. Pregnancy lasts 10 to 11 months and normally produces only one offspring. Moreover, dolphins, it seems, are fussy about their mates. Scientists say that at least 20 dolphins are needed to breed a healthy group of the mammals. Moreover, the Chinese river dolphins are so scarce now that they simply cannot find one another.

China has made some efforts at preservation. The Institute of Hydrobiology here in Wuhan opened a semi-natural reserve on an oxbow lake 1.25 miles wide and 12.5 miles long that was formed in 1972 when a channel of the Yangtze was straightened for flood control.

But catching dolphins to put in the reserve is not easy. Search parties have been frustrated, not only by the scarcity of the mammals but by their ability to swim with 25-mile-an-hour bursts of speed and to stay submerged for up to seven minutes.

Once caught, the dolphins have fared little better than those in the wild. Several dolphins "saved" from the river and put in reserves or tanks have died. One perished after getting tangled in a net at the lake reserve. Two died in Wuhan of heat prostration because their tank's water temperature rose too high one summer.

"The Chinese do not have a good record of keeping dolphins in captivity," Genthe said. "Though Qiqi has done well for 18 years in the Wuhan Dolphinarium, this is an exception."

"Human problems always seem to take priority over conservation issues, even in so-called wildlife `reserves,' " Jefferson said. "This must change if there is to be any serious conservation effort in China."

The Three Gorges Dam is the most glaring example of China's other priorities. "The dam will change the nature of the environment drastically," said Wang Ding, researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology.

The dam will probably lower water temperatures by 1 degree during the spring mating season.

It will also cause the washing away of sandy beaches and islands where the baiji feed and reproduce, and it might change the direction of the river so that it no longer flows into the oxbow lake, an alteration that would wipe out years of effort to create a natural reserve.

"The dolphin tells us about the destruction of nature and the environment," said Wang. "It is a warning to us about the speed of the destruction and our future."