Chinese paddlefish: a unique species of huge Asian fish (7 photos)

Being a fish is not an easy task. Especially if you belong to one of the oldest groups living on the planet. Your whole life is a continuous struggle. First millions of years of evolution, then the emergence of competitors. Further global changes and mass extinctions.





One of the rare photographs of these fish not as an exhibit.

But you, with the fortitude and calm of a Shaolin monk, experience the ugliness happening around you. Until a person appears and completely ruins your efforts. A Chinese paddlefish would tell you something like this story. If only it hadn't died out.

The Chinese paddlefish, or psefur, is one of two species of fish in the paddlefish family, order Sturgeon. This detachment is known for having appeared in the Jurassic period. And the first finds of fish belonging to the “nosed” family are known from the Early Cretaceous deposits of China, 120 million years old. The ancestors of modern paddlefish - American and Chinese - separated about 70 million years ago. And since then they have felt great on different parts of the planet.



Nowadays paddlefish can only be seen in museums.

At first glance, the psefur did not look very extravagant. A long light gray body, small eyes and a flattened, elongated snout - rostrum. Actually, it is because of him that paddlefish got their name. It housed the Ampullae of Lorenzini, a special sensory organ responsible for electroreception. He helped to capture the electric fields that emanate from all living beings. This is how the paddlefish searched for prey. It powerfully sucked in its fish victims. No obscenities, pure physiology! The powerful mouth of the paddlefish sharply moved forward and created a vacuum into which the small fish fell.



These very specks are the Ampullae of Lorenzini.

The Chinese paddlefish makes up for its unremarkable appearance in size. The fisherman could reach a length of more than 3 meters and weighed about 300 kg. There is information that individual long-nosed individuals up to 7 meters long have been encountered. But, alas, it is now impossible to find confirmation of these data due to the lack of paddlefish themselves. However, even with its smallest dimensions, psefur was one of the largest freshwater fish on the planet.



Dinner is served!

The Chinese paddlefish once lived in the lower reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. Sometimes he could spend time in salty coastal waters. But everything changed with the onset of spawning, in March - April. The fact is that, like many other sturgeons, the paddlefish was an anadromous fish. This means that in order to reproduce, they must travel through the river system, swimming into tributaries. By the beginning of the love season, adult fish gathered in schools and migrated together hundreds of kilometers upstream.



The ship of love crashed on the iceberg of extinction.

Having risen to the spawning grounds, the proboscis whales were actively engaged in multiplying their genus. One mother fish could lay more than 100 thousand eggs with a diameter of 2-3 mm. But what happened next is a mystery shrouded in darkness. The juveniles probably gradually moved back down the river after hatching. If the baby paddlefish was lucky, it could live a long life of about 50 years.



Even as adults, psefurs retained a number of features inherent in juveniles. This is a fairly rare example of paedomorphosis among fish that people have been able to study.

And everything was fine until people appeared in the life of the paddle-nosed giant. To begin with, sapiens enriched their menu with dishes made from meat and fish caviar, actively fishing for several centuries. But the critical blow was the growing human demand for electricity. To satisfy this need, by the end of the 20th century, the bipeds built a hydroelectric power station for themselves. The hydroelectric power plant, located in the main channel of the river, was designed without stairs or channels for fish migration. This completely cut off the psephurs from the few spawning grounds they had. Then people needed to build another hydroelectric power station... And although in the heat of the battle for a bright human future, scientists managed to understand that paddlefish had problems, they were not immediately able to realize the scale of the disaster.



Sadness and melancholy eats me up: people are getting married; I see that I’m the only one walking around unmarried. Or rather, I'm lying.

And when attempts to change something began, it was already too late. Since 1982, scientists have been trying to track the small population of fish in nature. The paddlefish were urgently taken under protection and several proboscis fish were caught to be kept in captivity. Alas, psefurs did not live long in an artificial environment. And each time it became more and more difficult to find new individuals. In 2006 - 2008, the last attempt was made to catch at least some representatives of this species. But not a single Chinese paddlefish has ever fallen into the traps and networks of scientists. And 16 years later, the species was declared officially extinct from the face of the Earth.