3 October 2020 | New Scientist | 41Features
The ones that
couldn’t get away
Hidden from sight, an overlooked group of giants
is in peril. What can be done to stop the megafish
extinction, asks Graham Lawton
T
HEY are the most threatened
group of organisms on the planet,”
says biologist Ivan Jarić. “More
than 70 per cent of species are critically
endangered, some are almost gone.”
He isn’t talking about the usual suspects:
great whales, great apes or the corals of the
Great Barrier Reef. He is talking about great
fish. Specifically, sturgeons and paddlefish.
Together they span 27 species, but 17 are in
the most precarious category on the red list
of endangered species.
Actually, make that 26 species. Earlier this
year, a team including Jarić broke the news
that one of the greatest of them all, the giant
Chinese paddlefish, is almost certainly no
more. It hasn’t been seen in the Yangtze river
basin since 2003 and a recent exhaustive
search failed to find any. “The chance it
still exists is very, very low,” says Jarić,
who is at the Czech Academy of Sciences
Institute of Hydrobiology.
Sturgeons are the hardest hit of a group of
animals that rarely make the headlines, even >ROBE
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