US Sued Over Vanishing Vaquita, the World's Smallest Porpoise

WASHINGTON (CN) — In a bid to protect an ever-dwindling species of porpoise, conservation groups blame the Trump administration in a federal complaint for giving Mexico a pass on reckless fishing practices.

“Vaquita face a single threat: they become entangled and drown in fishing gear, including in gear set illegally to catch totoaba, a giant, endangered fish,” according to the complaint led in Washington by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Native to the Gulf of California in Mexico, the totoaba are prized for their large swim bladders, meant to ensure buoyancy in the water, which fetch upwards of $46,00 per kilogram on the black market.

The bladders, referred to as “maw,” are popular in China and believed to hold medicinal properties, including curing arthritis, improving skin and boosting fertility.

Though Mexico banned totoaba fishing in 1975 as the species’ population declined, the Center for Biological Diversity says that Mexico’s failure to enforce said ban has led the vaquita’s population to plummet.

“The issue is that the vaquita is essentially a very similar size as the totoaba, so it gets captured in the nets that are used in the illegal fishery,” explained Andrew Rypel, who is the Peter B. Moyle and California trout chair in cold-water fish ecology at the University of California, Davis. “So the vaquita is this collateral damage species that’s in trouble,”


https://www.courthousenews.com/us-sued-over-vanishing-vaquita-the-worlds-smallest-porpoise/