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THE OCEAN’S RAREST MAMMAL HAS A FEW FINAL LESSONS TO TEACH US

A tiny porpoise called the vaquita has polarized a Mexican fishing town. The
species is fighting for its life.

By Benji Jones@BenjiSJones Dec 7, 2021, 6:00am EST
Photographs by Luis Antonio Rojas for Vox
A vaquita skeleton is exhibited at the temporary show “Oceans” in the Universum
museum in Mexico City. The vaquita is a critically endangered species of
porpoise endemic to the northern end of the Gulf of California in Baja
California, Mexico. Luis Antonio Rojas for Vox


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TheThe most endangered marine mammal on Earth, a small porpoise called the
vaquita, lives just off the coast of San Felipe, a small Mexican fishing town in
Baja California. Thousands of these animals, which have distinctive black
markings around their lips and eyes, once lived in the warm Gulf of California.
But by the summer of 2018, scientists estimated that fewer than 19 remained in
the entire world, according to the most recent published estimates.

One morning in November, I set out to sea in a small boat near San Felipe with
three members of a community that conservationists have accused of killing
vaquitas: shrimp fishermen. Dressed in white rubber boots and colorful waders,
the men had agreed to show me what it’s like to fish using gillnets, a kind of
net that often unintentionally catches marine animals other than shrimp.

The captain, a short man in his 60s with a thick gray mustache, motored us out
as the sun was rising. Big-bellied pelicans cruised beside us. I spent the next
10 hours watching the crew fish with long walls of net that hang from buoys like
sheets in the ocean. Gillnets are designed to trap marine creatures that swim or
drift into them, especially if their bodies are roughly the same width as the
openings in the net — in this case, about the size of a credit card.

Fishermen pull a gillnet with a crab stuck in it from the water near San Felipe.

That morning, the fishermen told me that in their experience, shrimp gillnets
don’t ensnare vaquitas. The nets break easily, one of them said, while ripping
through the thin strands of green nylon with his hand. If a vaquita gets stuck,
it can tear its way out, he added. (The man asked me not to share his name so he
could speak freely without fear of reprisal from other fishers or
conservationists.)

But some research, carried out by US and Mexican institutions, shows that shrimp
gillnets are among the kinds of gillnets that imperil vaquitas. The porpoises,
which are about half the size of a bottlenose dolphin, get tangled in the mesh
and eventually drown — a cruel irony for an animal that lives underwater.

The fishermen’s nets didn’t snag any vaquitas, though they did bring in plenty
of other species they didn’t mean to catch: small guitarfish, scorpionfish,
dozens of crabs, and a stingray the size of a pillow. The ray was alive when the
men tossed it back to sea, though it had several cuts on the tips of its fins.
The fishermen caught hundreds of shrimp, too, some of which we ate after boiling
them in seawater using a small propane stove they brought on board. (They were
delicious.)

Five species of shrimp caught using a gillnet on a local shrimping boat in San
Felipe.
The captain of the boat holds an injured stingray that was accidentally caught
by their gillnet.

To conservationists, the way to save the vaquitas is simple: eliminate the use
of gillnets like these. But if there’s one lesson that vaquitas can teach us,
it’s that transforming a way of life of even a small community isn’t simple at
all.

Scientists, environmentalists, and government officials eager to save the
vaquita have tried many times to rid the Upper Gulf of gillnets, and have even
banned them outright in some areas. Not only have those efforts failed, they’ve
also angered local fishers, who make up a large portion of San Felipe’s 17,000
or so residents. Tensions rose to a boiling point early this year after a ship
operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
tried to remove a fishing boat’s gillnet, provoking a conflict. The Sea Shepherd
ship and a fishing boat collided, resulting in the death of a fisherman.

The tension was still palpable in November when another skiff approached our
boat. One of the fishermen looked at me and photographer Luis Antonio Rojas and
yelled from the other boat: “Throw them overboard. They want to stop us from
fishing.”

I was clearly an outsider — was it the blotches of sunscreen? — and local
fishers often say that outsiders want to interfere with a whole community’s
livelihood to try to save the few vaquitas that are left. Their frustration
probably isn’t helped by the fact that the vaquita may be too far gone to come
back from the brink of extinction now.

“We fishermen are also going extinct,” said Mario Humberto Izquierdo Hernandez,
a fisherman in his late 60s whom I met at the port in San Felipe. He’s been
fishing his whole life and has never seen a vaquita.

Talking to the fishermen, I couldn’t help but feel that no one wins in this
conflict between fishing and conservation: It pits two groups who both love the
ocean against each other. And how is anyone supposed to save a local species
without the support of the local community?

But there’s something that could be more devastating than the extinction of the
vaquita: the risk that thousands of other threatened species worldwide that
share habitat with people will die off in the midst of these same kinds of
conflicts. Ultimately, that’s what brought me here, to figure out what we can
learn — and what we can even gain — when we lose the vaquita.

InIn mid-October, a team of scientists from Mexico and the US piled onto two
large ships off the coast of Baja California, near San Felipe, and motored out
to sea. Their goal was to survey the last remaining vaquitas. The boats weaved
through a constellation of fishing skiffs to a nearby patch of ocean not far
from land.

Each ship carried a handful of skilled wildlife spotters, who would take
one-hour turns scanning the water. From sunrise to sunset, pairs of spotters
peered out to sea with plus-size mounted binoculars called “big eyes.” A
recorder would stand right behind them, ready to carefully jot down any
sightings of the porpoise.

Even with the right equipment, these animals are hard to spot. Vaquitas are tiny
— about five feet long — and shy compared to other marine animals. They don’t
like ships, and tend to pop up once and then disappear. Making it harder, the
Upper Gulf can be choppy and murky, not a clear Caribbean blue. Their small fins
blend in and you often can’t see more than a few feet or so below the surface.

A pair of vaquitas swim off the coast of San Felipe in October 2008. Paula Olson

Most challenging of all is that vaquitas are so incredibly rare. Their numbers
have declined by 99 percent in the past decade, research shows. During the last
major survey, in 2019, researchers saw an estimated 10 animals (though that
number doesn’t represent the entire population, because the scientists searched
a limited area). That may be why half a dozen or so older fishermen told me that
they have never once seen a vaquita, even though they’ve spent most of their
lives on the water in the porpoise’s habitat.

Fishing is the main reason for this sharp decline. But there’s one catch in
particular that’s especially problematic: the totoaba, a greenish-gray drum
fish.

Like the vaquita, the fish is endemic to the gulf and threatened with
extinction. One of its organs known as the swim bladder — part of the body that
helps it control buoyancy — is valuable on the black market. Poachers catch the
fish in gillnets and remove their swim bladders, which Mexican cartels smuggle
into China. Some people consider totoaba swim bladder a delicacy with medicinal
properties, and just a gram of it can go for up to $46 US, according to a 2018
report. (For reference, the price of gold is currently around $57 per gram.)

A worker from Acuario Oceánico, a private totoaba farm, holds a 3 kilogram
specimen caught for a local restaurant.
Dried totoaba swim bladders, considered a delicacy in China, rest inside a
cardboard box at Acuario Oceánico.
A fisherman displays an illegal gillnet used to catch totoaba for a photograph.

Why does this matter for vaquitas? Fishers catch totoaba using gillnets made
with thick nylon strands that have particularly large openings (the fish can
grow to more than six feet long). When vaquitas get stuck, it’s hard for them to
escape. Though most kinds of gillnets can ensnare vaquitas, totoaba nets pose
the greatest threat to the porpoise, scientists say.

Just after the vaquita survey concluded, I drove to a port on the southern edge
of San Felipe to meet a scientist who helped lead it, Barbara Taylor. I walked
down a long, narrow ramp onto a dock where the air smelled especially fishy.
Before me was one of the survey ships, the Narval, a large gray vessel with a
vaquita model on its deck.

Taylor, a marine scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), met me on the ship’s upper deck, wearing a vaquita
bracelet, vaquita earrings, and a shirt that said: “May the vaquita always swim
here!”

Over the shrill calls of seagulls, I asked Taylor the big question: Had they
found any?

Barbara Taylor, a senior scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, has been studying vaquitas since the 1990s.

“It’s lonely out there,” said Taylor, 67, who’s been studying vaquitas since the
’90s and has participated in seven other similar surveys. “It’s one of those
things that those of us who work on the vaquita lose sleep about,” she added.
“Are we going to come out here and see none?”

Thankfully, not this time. There were eight vaquita sightings across the two
ships, and each sighting typically includes one to three animals, according to
Jonathan White, an author who was on the ship and helped fund the expedition.
Those sightings also included calves, said White, who reviewed unpublished
findings of the survey. White stressed that survey estimates don’t represent the
total number of vaquitas in the Gulf, and are only an estimate of how many
individuals the scientists saw during the survey.

The first sighting on the Narval was close to sunset on the first day of the
trip, said Ernesto Vázquez Morquecho, one of the official spotters. He saw the
animal’s fin and back breach the surface — “just enough to describe it as a
vaquita,” he told me that morning. “It was really, really hopeful.”

Ernesto Vázquez Morquecho was one of the official vaquita spotters on board the
Narval ship.

It’s hard to imagine that spotting perhaps a dozen individuals of any species is
hopeful. In fact, many scientists would likely consider a population of that
size “functionally extinct,” meaning the animal is no longer fulfilling a
function in the ecosystem — in this case, controlling the populations of small
fish and other critters vaquitas prey on. But for Vázquez Morquecho, Taylor, and
the other scientists, it’s still a good sign — and useful for conservation.

“It’s important to know that the vaquitas are still out there and that it is
worth trying to give those last individuals a break,” Taylor said. The other
good news, she added, is that vaquitas appear to be reproducing as fast as they
can. “You shouldn’t write them off,” she said. Sometimes, against the odds,
nature can recover when it’s given a chance.

Pickup trucks carry fishing boats on the beach in San Felipe early in the
morning of November 4.

SanSan Felipe is a desert town about two and a half hours south of the US
border, located on a stretch of the Baja coast where dust devils rise from miles
of silty sand. Many cultures mesh and collide here: You can see retirees from
Ohio eating dinner next to marine biologists not far from a strip club, while a
few hundred feet away, fishermen haul up their catch from the beach. At least on
the surface, San Felipe is not a wealthy town; I saw no mansions or flashy cars.

A loose coalition of scientists, local and global conservation groups, Mexican
officials, and even a celebrity or two has been trying to give vaquitas a chance
for decades now. The Mexican government has enacted various bans on gillnet
fishing in large parts of the Upper Gulf. It also established a handful of
protected areas, including the Zero Tolerance Area, an 87-square-mile zone about
30 minutes off the coast of San Felipe where fishing is technically prohibited
altogether.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

But this name is a misnomer since local fishers don’t usually follow these rules
— in part because of a lack of enforcement. While only some fishers catch
totoaba, nearly all of them use gillnets and fish in the Zero Tolerance Area.
During the surveys in 2019 and this year, Taylor saw “no evidence of
enforcement,” she told me. In fact, she said, the survey team had trouble even
looking for vaquitas in the Zero Tolerance Area because there were so many
fishing skiffs. (Mexican government officials did not respond to a request for
comment.)

Most scientists and fishers I spoke to, and even some of the very people tasked
with enforcing the law, agreed that there’s barely any enforcement. Several
marines stationed aboard a naval ship near the Narval told me they patrol the
Zero Tolerance Area every day, but it’s hard to control fishing because there
are so many boats coming in and out. (The officers spoke on condition of
anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.) They also
acknowledged that fishers face pressure to earn money for their families.

The captain of a local shrimp fishing boat sails out of San Felipe early in the
morning of November 5.

American conservation groups, working alongside the Mexican government, have
tried more drastic measures to save vaquitas. In the fall of 2017, a program
called VaquitaCPR, largely staffed by US scientists, captured two vaquitas that
they had planned to take into human care until gillnets could be removed from
their habitat. The first animal, a young female, showed signs of extreme stress
after it was captured. Fearing the worst, the scientists released it back into
the ocean. It disappeared. The second, an adult female, was similarly distressed
and had a heart attack when the team released it into the water. It died shortly
after. Unlike some other rare species like the tiger or red panda, vaquitas have
not survived in captivity.

Meanwhile, Sea Shepherd — which was involved in the survey — began sending out a
ship to cut and remove fishers’ illegal gillnets, also with the support of the
Mexican government. In 2019, a National Geographic documentary produced in part
by Leonardo DiCaprio, Sea of Shadows, featured the organization. Following the
deadly collision this year, Sea Shepherd claimed that fishers attacked its ship
before ramming into it. The family of the deceased fisherman claimed that Sea
Shepherd ran into his skiff, according to BBC News.

Captain Peter Hammarstedt, Sea Shepherd’s director of campaigns, told Vox that
the organization has for years “supported local fishing communities and the
Mexican government to remove illegal fishing gear” from a protected area called
the Vaquita Refuge. “Without these net removal operations, the vaquita would
likely already be extinct,” Hammarstedt said. National Geographic did not
respond to a request for comment.

An us-versus-them mentality now hangs over the two camps, said Valeria Towns, a
former government official in Mexico’s environmental ministry and the program
coordinator at Museo de la Ballena, a Mexican environmental organization. (The
organization owns the Narval ship, which also removes illegal gillnets in
vaquita habitat, she said.) Documentaries like Sea of Shadows can make things
worse, Towns said, because they make fishermen look like villains. “It polarized
the complex social issue in the area,” she said of the documentary. The problem
is that now fishers in San Felipe, she added, “feel like the vaquita is their
worst enemy.”

The Farley Mowat, a Sea Shepherd boat, on the Cortes Sea in San Felipe in 2016.
Hector Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images

After meeting Taylor on the Narval, I drove south down the coast to a beach
about 45 minutes from San Felipe. I was there to witness a different approach to
vaquita conservation — fishing with a sustainable net that catches shrimp
without killing porpoises.

Under an awning a few hundred feet from the ocean, I met a fisherman who builds
eco-friendly nets. He’s a member of a local coalition of sustainable fishers,
called Pesca ABC, but he fishes outside of town because he’s concerned about
conflicts with other San Felipe fishers. He also asked me not to share his name.

“Ninety-eight percent of fishermen don’t know how to use these different nets,”
the fisherman, a middle-aged man wearing a loose polo shirt, told me. If you
don’t have the proper training to use them, they capture less, he adds. “That’s
why they don’t like them,” he said. “That’s why they think the other nets are
better.”

We sat on stools near the beach as the light faded, and he used his hands to
demonstrate how the net works. Unlike gillnets, which hang in the water largely
unattended, this net drags behind a boat, said the man, who’s been fishing for
almost 40 years. The eco-friendly part is a metal grate inside the net, called
an excluder. When large animals enter, they run into the grate and exit through
a hole nearby, whereas the shrimp pass through and get caught. “There’s no
bycatch,” he said, meaning that fishers using these nets rarely catch other
species by mistake. (Some fishers who use gillnets dispute that claim.)

The problem is that the fishing community, on the whole, believes these nets
capture less, according to Daniel Arellano Millán, Pesca ABC’s field coordinator
in San Felipe, who joined us on the beach. Pesca ABC is trying to collect data
that shows eco-friendly nets can be profitable, Arellano Millán said.

As we were finishing up our conversation, another fisherman approached in the
darkness, barefoot, carrying a white bucket splashed with brown mud. He sat
beside me and shined a flashlight inside. A large triggerfish lay on a pile of
squirming tentacles. Octopuses. “Should I put one on your back?” the man said,
laughing, as he pulled them out of the bucket to count.

The ocean here is full of life, from sea turtles to dolphins to these octopuses.
That’s what draws fishers here in the first place, and it’s what
conservationists want to protect. Both of these communities care about this
stretch of coastline because of its staggering abundance — but they have very
different visions for what should be done with it.

FishersFishers have more interest than anyone in saving the vaquita, according
to Lorenzo García Carrillo, who heads up the largest federation of fishers in
San Felipe. I met García Carrillo, 48, at his office, a bright yellow building
near the main beach in town. “We live from the resources in the sea,” he said.

Lorenzo García Carrillo, who leads a local group representing fishers, speaks on
his cellphone in his San Felipe office on November 6.

While scientists come to San Felipe with a salary from organizations and
governments, he said, fishers here get their salary from selling seafood. He
estimates they make anywhere from $23,000 to $47,000 a year, on average. “This
is a fisherman’s town,” and there aren’t many other industries, added Izquierdo
Hernandez, the fisherman I met at the port. A healthy sea is good for vaquitas,
but it’s also good for those whose livelihoods depend on it.

Fishers have another reason to care: “If the vaquita goes extinct, there’s going
to be punishment,” said García Carrillo, who worries that the government or
conservation organizations may take action against fishers. “It would be
catastrophic.”

So why do fishers continue to use gillnets? García Carrillo claims that
sustainable nets like the one we saw capture far fewer shrimp — not even enough
to recoup the cost of gasoline. Like the shrimp fishermen who took me out to
sea, he also doesn’t believe that gillnets actually kill vaquitas. Scientists
strongly disagree with that claim. “The claim that vaquitas don’t die in those
nets is known to be false,” Taylor, the NOAA scientist, said of shrimp gillnets.

A number of existing solutions might help vaquitas, from sustainable nets to
steering fishing boats clear of the Zero Tolerance Area. The challenge is that
when scientists push for these changes, they don’t get through to most fishers.
Part of the barrier is surely cost — gillnets require less gasoline to operate
than sustainable nets and they can capture hundreds of pounds of shrimp per day.
But it’s clear that politics and culture play a role, too.

The scientists I spoke to acknowledged that gillnetting is a way of life for
much of San Felipe’s fishing community. There’s a culture of competition that
rewards catching more fish, and even fishing the endangered totoaba — becoming
what’s known locally as a totoabero — looks appealing if it comes with a hefty
paycheck, Towns, the former government official, said.

Two shrimp fishermen remove shrimp, crabs, and other bycatch from a gillnet off
the coast of San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico. | Benji Jones/Vox

There’s also not much of an incentive to catch fish sustainably. I noticed that
there’s no market for vaquita-friendly shrimp, for example, and there’s no
effective regulation of gillnets. So fishers are actually making “the
economically sane choice” by continuing to use them, Taylor said.

“As long as I’ve been here, there really has never been any rewards for the
people who do it right and lots of rewards for people who do it wrong,” Taylor
continued. “I don’t blame them for not having faith that that’s going to
change.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

OnOn my last day in San Felipe, I hired a fisherman to take me out to the Zero
Tolerance Area. I wanted to test my luck with vaquita spotting. Have you ever
looked for a critically endangered species? It’s not easy or particularly fun.
Staring out at the sea, I saw about 10 fishing boats, plenty of pelicans, and an
empty Doritos bag. No porpoises.

I felt a sense of loss as my mind wandered. We’re watching an extinction happen
in slow motion, and time, money, laws, and research haven’t been enough to stop
it. Across the spectrum of opinion — which includes the conservationists, the
fishers, and those in both camps — most people are unhappy with the process.

While some fishers, especially those that regularly catch totoaba, have profited
handsomely, the majority of people here fish to get by. They say that all the
efforts to save the vaquita have only made their lives harder — the San Felipe
fishing community left as the bycatch of the net of restrictions
conservationists have advocated for.

Reporter Benji Jones looks for vaquitas inside the Zero Tolerance Area.

Conservationists around the world can learn lessons from efforts to save
vaquitas, Towns told me. If the vaquita goes extinct, she said, “we should write
a book about all the things you shouldn’t do if you want to preserve a species.”

Over the past three decades, much of the money spent on vaquita conservation —
tens of millions of dollars — has gone toward valuable science-based efforts
like surveys. But ultimately, the vaquita faces a problem rooted in complex
social dynamics. “Too many scientists are influencing the policies,” Towns said.
To solve the problem from the root, she said, local people must be involved in
managing their own resources.

Taylor, for her part, wishes there was more of an effort, early on, to develop
an “ethic for sustainability” among the fishing community. “I think that the
conservation world right now is really seeing how important it is to get the
communities involved at a very early stage,” she said. If she could turn back
the clock, she would have also encouraged scientists to capture vaquitas when
there were more of them — and thus more room for error. Captive vaquitas could
have preserved a reservoir of healthy animals that could have been reintroduced
later on.

“You have to fight for the best and prepare for the worst,” she said. “We did
not prepare for the worst.”

On the day that the shrimp fishermen took me out on the ocean, I saw a lot of
life and death. A dolphin surfaced about 100 feet from the boat, and pelicans
fought with each other over bycatch. The fishermen removed dying fish and shrimp
from the net; crabs wielded their pincers in self-defense as they tried to
scurry away. I felt amazement and sadness at the same time. I understood that I
could mourn the same creatures that inspire joy and wonder and keep a community
alive. It’s that joy that reminds us of what’s worth saving.

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting project on the science,
politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

Luis Antonio Rojas contributed reporting.


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