Tuesday marks the fifth Yangtze River Porpoise Conservation Day and the fourteenth International Freshwater Porpoise Day. In recent years, thanks to the ecological protection of the Yangtze River, an increasingly large number of finless porpoises have been spotted in various parts of the Jiangsu section of the Yangtze River.
Nanjing is the only large city in China with stable habitat of wild finless porpoises in the central section of the city. In order to accurately monitor the activities of finless porpoises, the Nanjing Yangtze River finless porpoise provincial-level nature reserve has spent four years building a smart monitoring system of "5G drone+sonar coordination".
“The Yangtze River finless porpoise is very small, with a body length of about 1.5 meters. It spends 90% of its time underwater, so we have deployed some underwater sonar to monitor the sound in the water. We have developed artificial intelligence algorithms and combined them with the images captured by drones to achieve more accurate quantity identification,” said Mei Zhigang, Associate Researcher, Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The latest statistics show that the Nanjing Yangtze River Porpoise Conservation Area recorded 62 porpoises, an increase of 24% from 5 years ago. In addition to Nanjing, the figure of the finless porpoise also frequently appears in many other places in Jiangsu.
“Today we were quite lucky to see four finless porpoises. When we traveled in September, we saw finless porpoises almost every day. There are more fish bait in the Yangtze River, and the number of finless porpoises is gradually increasing,” said Xie Hongbing, Member of the Second Division of the Jingjiang Fishery Protection Team.
The population of finless porpoises is an important indicator of the ecological health status of the Yangtze River. In recent years, Jiangsu has placed the protection and restoration of the ecological environment of the Yangtze River in an overwhelming position by effectively implementing the "ten-year fishing ban" so that the water ecological environment of the Jiangsu section of the Yangtze River has been continuously improving, and the suitable habitat for the Yangtze River finless porpoise has been expanding.
