Fishers decry 'underhanded' new initiative to protect Mexico's vaquita

by Daniel Shailer on 24 May 2024

• Over the past two years, the Mexican Navy has installed hundreds of anti-trawling hooks to prevent vaquitas being caught in illegal gill nets in the Upper Gulf of California.
  
  
• The long hooks, attached to concrete blocks, are designed to snag the gill nets that target totoaba fish, but which have become notorious for driving the vaquita porpoise to the brink of extinction.
  
  
• The project was initially credited with an immediate drop in illegal fishing boats in the vaquita’s core habitat, but fishers from the community of San Felipe say new blocks were installed without warning outside the core habitat, snagging more of their equipment and creating ghost nets that could harm vaquitas.
  
  
• Results from the latest vaquita population survey are expected in June; last year, scientists said as few as 10 of the critically endangered porpoises may still be alive.

The latest attempt to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise from being snagged in nets meant for the coveted totoaba fish may prove to be the most effective yet. But the way it’s being administered by the Mexican Navy is opaque and underhanded, local fishers say, and may even prove a threat to the species it purports to conserve.

Over the past two years, the Navy has placed hundreds of long metal hooks attached in pairs to concrete blocks in the Upper Gulf of California, off the coast of San Felipe, a fishing town in the Mexican state of Baja California. At first, all of the blocks were sunk in the vaquita’s core habitat, where fishing is banned entirely, called the zero tolerance area (ZTA).

The vaquita (Phocoena sinus) has been driven to the brink of extinction by gillnet fishing, a type of stationary trawling where a net is left hanging vertically in the water like a wall for fish to swim into. The holes in a gillnet are sized to capture specific animals, from shrimp to corvina, but are notorious for ensnaring marine megafauna such as sharks, turtles and cetaceans as bycatch.

There are between 10 and 13 vaquitas left in the world, according to the most recent survey last summer.

More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/05/fishers-decry-underhanded-new-initiative-to-protect-mexicos-vaquita/