Mexican officials aboard a navy boat haul in an illegal gill net containing about 20 totoabas in varying stages of decay. Sea Shepherd\u2019s MV Farley Mowat found the net drifting in the Upper Gulf of California after the rotting fish swelled with gas and raised it to the surface. Photo by Sarah Gilman<\/p><\/div>\n
In the early 1900s, totoabas were so plentiful here that they helped spawn the primary fishing communities of the Upper Gulf, including San Felipe, a sprawl of buildings and potholed roads that lines the nearshore. By 1975, though, damming on the Colorado River had irrevocably altered totoaba spawning habitat, and fishermen had nearly obliterated the species for its meat and its swim bladder, which fetched a premium for its use in Chinese medicinal soup. That year, Mexico made it illegal to catch the fish, followed soon after by international and US law. But today\u2019s net is a hint that the trade has surged back to ravenous life. It\u2019s not yet clear what that means for totoabas: the first survey of recovering stocks is only now underway.<\/p>\n
What is clear is that the nets destroy much more than their intended catch. And their reappearance has made stark the fatal cracks in a longstanding effort to save another creature, one that is much harder to see, and getting more difficult to find every day: the vaquita marina.<\/p>\n
Spanish for little cow of the sea, the vaquita marina is the world\u2019s smallest and rarest cetacean. It is endemic to the Upper Gulf and occupies just 4,000 square kilometers of ocean, anchored by a guano-whitewashed pyramid of granite called Rocas Consag, east of San Felipe. Its plump body is gracefully tapered, reaching up to 1.5 meters, and its black-ringed eyes have drawn panda comparisons. Mexico\u2019s chief vaquita scientist, Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, and a colleague once described the porpoise\u2019s upturned mouth as \u201ca haunting little smile: Mona Lisa with black lipstick.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the Upper Gulf\u2019s relentless light, the vaquita exists almost entirely in shadow. Most of what\u2019s understood about the animal\u2019s life is understood from its death. The vaquita was only described as a species in the 1950s, after three skulls washed up near San Felipe. The only photographs showing the animal\u2019s full body are of corpses. When a living vaquita does appear, it tends to be in the distance as a quick slash of dorsal fin. Unlike dolphins, the porpoise shuns motors, travels solo or in pairs, and spends little time at the surface except to breathe. \u201cYou know it\u2019s a vaquita,\u201d one fisherman told me, \u201cbecause you don\u2019t see it again.\u201d<\/p>\nYour browser does not support the video element.<\/p><\/video>\n
In this rare footage captured in October 2008 by videographer Chris Johnson, live vaquitas slice slowly through the Upper Gulf of California. Video taken under permit (Oficio No. DR\/847\/08) from the Comisi\u00f3n Nacional de \u00c1reas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP)\/Secretar\u00eda de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (SEMARNAT) within a natural protected area subject to management decreed as such by the Mexican Government.<\/span><\/p>\nStill, the animal\u2019s downward trend was clear enough that the Mexican government designated the Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve to protect it and the totoaba in 1993. In 1997, the first reliable visual survey revealed there were fewer than 600 vaquitas.<\/p>\n
The hard use of the once-flush Colorado River, mostly by thirsty US farmers and cities, was an obvious possible culprit. Over the past 50 years, it has seldom reached its mouth at the apogee of the Upper Gulf, starving the area of river-delivered nutrients, sediments, and fresh water. And yet, while the scientific community still debates the nature and extent of impacts on fish and other species, the Upper Gulf remains a stubbornly rich and astoundingly biodiverse environment. Powerful currents and tides churn up older nutrients deposited by the river and bring in others from the Pacific, which in turn help support clouds of plankton that sustain an intricate food web knotted with whales, sea turtles, and sharks, and pearled with numerous endemic marine species.<\/p>\n
When scientists have examined dead vaquitas, they have consistently found them fat with fish and squid. When scientists tested their blubber, they found it relatively unburdened by the chemical contaminants that have accumulated in marine mammals elsewhere. When scientists investigated vaquitas\u2019 lack of genetic diversity, they determined the animals had been relatively rare for a long time, suggesting that inbreeding depression wasn\u2019t responsible for the decline.<\/p>\n
The same year as the visual survey, the then-new International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita (CIRVA) concluded that another beneficiary of the Gulf\u2019s bounty posed the most immediate threat to the porpoise: the fishing industry. Independent by-catch studies analyzing data from the 1980s and \u201990s showed that vaquitas drowned at unsustainable rates in the gill nets that small-scale, or artisanal, fishermen strung like curtains through the water from fiberglass boats called pangas<\/em>. Because of their size, vaquitas were particularly vulnerable to large-gauge nets set for bigger fish\u2014especially those for totoabas, which still fed a low-level black market trade. Yet vaquitas also tangled in small-gauge gill nets designed for tiny quarry like shrimp, a major economic staple for local communities, especially after the legal totoaba fishery crashed.<\/p>\nNearly from the beginning, CIRVA\u2014an ad hoc team of national and international scientists, Mexican officials, NGO representatives, and other experts\u2014found that a complete gill net ban would be necessary to ensure that vaquitas survived in their limited range, only part of which fell inside the original reserve. In the years that followed, the Mexican government stopped short of that, but poured resources into another vaquita refuge where certain large-gauge gill nets were banned. Later, it introduced a sweeping proposal for a gill net phaseout, programs to develop vaquita-friendly gear to replace nets, and initiatives to buy out some fishermen\u2019s permits and gear and help them shift to different work.<\/p>\n
A dead vaquita is displayed on a mound of net. In a last-ditch effort to save the species, officials plan to trap the remaining vaquitas and move them to captivity in Mexico this fall. Photo by Flip Nicklin\/Minden Pictures\/WWF<\/p><\/div>\n
The conservation efforts were ambitious but troubled, and the gill net phaseout stalled. Different work isn\u2019t necessarily easy to find in rural Mexico, and in multigenerational fishing families where many men started fishing as adolescents, continuing the practice is about identity and inertia, as well as income. While the buyouts succeeded in reducing the number of active pangas, only fishermen ready to retire or with other skills opted for them, and voluntary participation petered out quickly. Those who tried to transition to tourism businesses had to contend with the 2008 global economic recession. Meanwhile, new fishing regulations were often confusing, enforcement of restrictions and reserves was spotty at best, illegal fishing was common within reserve boundaries, and corruption was rampant. In 2005, for example, the Mexican government gave the Upper Gulf states of Baja California and Sonora US $1-million to implement vaquita conservation actions within the new refuge. Instead, local authorities spent the money elsewhere, including on new outboard motors for fishermen.<\/p>\n
Attempts to develop vaquita-safe equipment also dragged out for years, leaving fishermen marooned without a solid alternative to nets. The National Fisheries and Aquaculture Institute focused much of its attention on a small shrimp trawl, at times testing it during the wrong season or running out of money before tests were complete. Some fishermen sabotaged efforts by stringing nets in the way. Even now the trawl\u2019s viability remains unclear: it requires more expertise to use, can add significant fuel costs, and may catch commercial quantities of shrimp only in some areas. Linking fishermen to customers willing to pay more for a vaquita-friendly product could solve some of those problems, but the government was also slow to issue permits, continually delaying a program to switch fishermen to the trawl. By 2015, when most of the Upper Gulf\u2019s 650 shrimp pangas were supposed to have transitioned, only a fraction had.<\/p>\n
Still, CIRVA scientists had hoped a summer vaquita monitoring effort that expanded in 2011 would reveal that the decline was at least slowing. Instead, their network of dozens of underwater acoustic devices\u2014which they use to estimate population trends based on vaquita vocalizations\u2014revealed exactly the opposite. The species\u2019 nosedive became a free fall, more than quadrupling to 34 percent annually.<\/p>\n
Reports trickling back to the scientists explained why. Whatever gains the stuttering conservation efforts had achieved were rapidly being erased by the massive expansion of the black market totoaba fishery around 2012. According to a 2016 report published by the Environmental Investigation Agency, the price for totoaba swim bladder\u2014known as buche<\/em> in Mexico\u2014had exploded in China, where vendors marketed it to members of a growing middle class as a replacement for the prized bladder of a nearly extinct Chinese croaker fish. Fishermen in Mexico reportedly received as much as $8,500 per kilo (a good-sized bladder might weigh 400 to 500 grams), earning buche the nickname \u201caquatic cocaine.\u201d Given the payback, it\u2019s no surprise that investigators suspect the involvement of organized crime, including drug cartels.<\/p>\n
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