Mexico is taking drastic measures to stave off possible extinction of the world’s tiniest porpoise, but the doomsday clock keeps ticking on the marine mammal known as the vaquita.
If the lights go out on the vaquita, it would mark the second porpoise species to disappear in this century as the result of human activity. The Yangtze River dolphin in China was declared functionally extinct in 2006.
A tiny and shy creature easily entangled in the gill nets used by fishermen, the vaquita has always been somewhat rare. It swims in the northern Gulf of California, which separates the Baja Peninsula from mainland Mexico. That’s the smallest range of any cetacean in the world.
Some of the fishermen blamed for the vaquita’s dwindling numbers would cheer a declaration that the creature is extinct. They say efforts to protect the mammal deprive them of their livelihood. They cast doubt on how many of the porpoises are even left.
Scientists using acoustic detection methods say the vaquita population dwindled from 567 in 1997 to only 97 last year, with fewer than 25 breeding females.
In late February, authorities announced that they’d expand a vaquita reserve in which all gill-net fishing is banned by nearly elevenfold, to cover about 5,000 square miles, a vast area that includes the delta where the Colorado River flows into the Gulf of California.
Later this month, authorities say, they’ll begin using drones and satellite detection to enforce the two-year fishing ban. They’ll start a $36 million buyout program that will pay fishermen to stay off their boats. The program also will splash cash onto a chain of commercial activity related to fishing.
“What we’re trying to do is attack the factors that lead to the death of the vaquita,” said Rafael Pacchiano Alamán, deputy secretary for protection at the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources.
Some leading environmental activists cheer the program, saying it could pull the vaquita from critical danger.
“If what the federal government has announced is effectively implemented, we have no doubt that the species will begin to recover,” said Omar Vidal, head of the Mexican branch of the World Wildlife Fund.
Vidal noted that whalers had hunted the northern elephant seal to near extinction a century ago, leaving only 25 animals on a volcanic shard of land known as Guadalupe Island, 150 miles off the Pacific Coast of Baja California.
“It recovered. Today the elephant seal population is healthy again,” he said.
In San Felipe, one of two main fishing towns at the edge of the vaquita reserve, fishermen voice anger and resentment at the gill-net ban and skepticism that it will work. Some scoff at estimates of 97 remaining vaquitas.
“They’ve pulled these numbers out of some magic hat,” said Sunshine Antonio Rodríguez, president of the Federation of Coastal Fishing Cooperatives of San Felipe.
“I’ve been at sea for 25 years, and I’ve seen one only once,” said Francisco Javier Albañez Mendoza, a fisherman. “People around here say that you should take the environmental activists and the vaquitas and get rid of them all.”
Rubén Aguilar Higuera, another fisherman, said the gill-net ban would hurt hundreds of families even if authorities compensated them for not fishing.
“They don’t seem to care about us human beings. They just seem to care about the vaquitas,” Aguilar said.
The vaquita was first identified in 1958 but never fully described by scientists until the mid-1980s. It lives in shallow turbid water, weighs no more than about 75 pounds and is known for long dive times. A skittish mammal, it’s rarely seen by humans on the surface. Females are thought to calve every second year.
Rather than living in pods, the vaquitas usually travel in groups of two.
While maintaining a traditional porpoise shape, the vaquitas also have a vampish trait. Black coloring rings their eyes and mouths, like smeared mascara. How the tiny porpoise got its name, which means “little cow” in Spanish, is not known.
Some unusual dietary beliefs in East Asia may have contributed to the vaquita’s dwindling numbers. Market demand has soared in recent years for the bladder of another endangered species, the totoaba, a fish that can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh 300 pounds.
“The price of a kilo of totoaba bladder can reach $10,000,” Pacchiano told a news conference last month in Mexico City.
“You eat it and it makes your kidneys and pancreas like new again. It rejuvenates you,” Rodolfo Márquez, a dockworker, said he’d heard.
The soaring value of totoaba bladder, dubbed “aquatic cocaine,” has spurred the arrival of pirate vessels and even reportedly lured organized crime into the business. Totoaba nets are thought to have swept up vaquitas, drowning them.
Authorities say they’ve issued 1,354 fishing licenses for 806 fishing boats and shrimp trawlers directly employing some 2,300 people.
Another 150 to 180 pirate boats use specialized nets to gather totoaba in the banned area, wreaking havoc on the vaquita population, said Ramón Franco Diaz, president of the Andrés Rubio Castro Cooperative Federation of Coastal Fishing.
Franco said pirate fishermen easily got off the hook when caught with totoaba, and maritime authorities sometimes looked the other way.
“If they catch someone with bladders, they take them up to Mexicali to the attorney general’s office. They pay the fine and are free in three days. If they take four more bladders, they’ve made up their losses,” Franco said.
Last November, authorities in Mexico City intercepted three boxes containing 385 totoaba bladders that had arrived from Mexicali, near San Felipe, and were en route to China.
“Unless there is better work at inspection and monitoring, no program (to save the vaquita) is going to work,” Franco said.
In addition to using drones, authorities plan on paying fishermen to act as maritime police in order to enforce the expanded ban on gill nets. Some 77 private boats operated by fishermen on the public payroll will join eight new naval interceptor vessels in combating pirate fishing, Pacchiano said.
The fishing ban was to go into effect March 1, but authorities ordered a delay to iron out kinks in who could take part in the buyout. Some boat owners padded their crew lists with relatives’ names – seeking to reap more compensation – but left off the names of those truly operating the nets.
“The owners have the right to put down two people on the list, and they put down their relatives, not us,” said Albañez, the fisherman.
Fishing union leaders say the ban should begin before the end of the month, and they’re eager for it to do so. They say serious scientific study during the ban may show that other factors cause vaquita deaths, including the drying up of the Colorado River before it reaches the Gulf of California, chemical contamination or inbreeding.
“The vaquita is the mermaid’s call. We’re not killing it. They are just trying to hang it on us,” said Rodríguez, the fishing federation president.
“After two years, we’re going back to fishing,” he said.
Vidal, the environmental activist, said the gill-net ban must become permanent and either sustainable fishing methods or new livelihoods found for the fishermen.
While that battle looms, scientists will begin a new census of the vaquita population perhaps by September, Pacchiano said, one that will be more rigorous in tallying how few of the mammals remain alive.
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