The Vaquitas' Last Summer

                                                                                         University of St Andrews/PA

Vaquitas are the smallest member of the porpoise family. They inhabit a small area of the upper Gulf of California. Their total estimated population is between 6 and 19 individuals. They are likely to become extinct in the next 12 months.

Researchers from St. Andrews in Scotland, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Mexican government counted the vaquitas by listening for their echolocation clicks. It is easier to monitor the porpoises acoustically than visually.

Since they began acoustic monitoring in 2011, the researchers have determined that the vaquita population has fallen by 98.6 percent.

Despite effort by a number of government and non-government organizations the decline of vaquitas numbers has not been stabilized let alone reversed.

That decline is due to the use of gillnets, large vertical nets that fishermen leave in the water to collect the totoaba whose bladders are important in traditional Chinese medicine...

Mexico banned fishing with gillnets in 2015, but despite this, the practice has continued. The researchers found that the vaquita population declined by 48 percent in 2017 and 47 percent in 2018.

The totoaba is a large fish that shares the vaquita's range. It is classified as endangered on the IUCN Red List. The vaquita are essentially by-catch. Caught up in the illegally placed gill nets used to catch the totoabas. The tragedy here is that the vaquita will be accidentally extinguished as a species so that wealthy Chinese can make a soup with the bladder of the totoaba, a fish that will likely follow the vaquita into extinction.

That fish, the totoaba, uses this organ, its swim bladder, to regulate buoyancy. For centuries, wealthy Chinese have used such bladders, what they often call “fish maws,” to make soups thought to smooth the discomfort of pregnancy and cure joint pain, among other ailments—and sometimes as speculative investments. In 2011, a single totoaba bladder could fetch as much as HK$1,000,000 (then about $137,000) in Hong Kong or Guangzhou, according to Greenpeace Asia, a nonprofit group. But these days, that same bladder is worth a mere HK$200,000 [$25,500 at today's exchange rate].

Vaquitas are very shy and difficult to find even in their small range. In 2017, a significant project was attempted to capture a vaquita with the hope of establishing the species in a safe aquarium environment. The ultimate goal was to rebuild the species in safety and then reintroduce them into the wild. The project failed.

In late October [2017], the team managed to catch its first vaquita. That was the good news. The bad news was that the young vaquita quickly became distressed and had to be released. But the team tried again, and on Saturday, Vaquita CPR had caught an adult female. Things again got worse and quickly. The team decided to release the vaquita, but she died—seemingly of cardiac arrest, though it’s too early to say for sure.

The scientists always knew this was a theoretical risk, but here was an actual dead vaquita on their hands. “A devastating setback. There are no words to express how sad I feel,” Andy Read, a marine conservation biologist on the Vaquita CPR project, wrote on Twitter. If the team can’t keep vaquitas alive in captivity, then they can’t breed vaquitas. And if they can’t breed them, then the species will almost certainly die out in the wild. This might just be the end.

The Sea Shepard organization along with the Mexican government and other NGOs will attempt to protect the vaquitas starting in October when the totoabas return to the vaquitas range after their annual migration. If these efforts at protection fail, the vaquitas will be gone.