The Only Comeback of Its Kind: Dr. Ding Wang, 2026 Kiessling Prize Recipient

In 2007, the baiji was declared functionally extinct. Dr. Ding Wang had spent his career trying to save it, and he watched it disappear from the Yangtze River forever. Then he made a decision: it would not happen twice. Nearly twenty years later, the Yangtze finless porpoise, known in China as the smiling angel of the Yangtze, is the only critically endangered small cetacean on Earth that is recovering. The wild population stopped declining in 2022 and has climbed to 1,426, a 40 percent incre...