The man who refused to lose a second river dolphin

Dr. Ding Wang watched the Yangtze lose one cetacean on his watch — and made certain it would not lose a second. His decades of work reversed the decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise, the world's only successful recovery of a critically endangered small cetacean, and he has now received the 2026 Wolfgang Kiessling International Prize for Species Conservation with an $80,000 grant. He built China's first multidisciplinary cetacean team, mentored more than 100 graduate students, and is carrying the same strategies to endangered river dolphins in Cambodia and Bangladesh.