From above, the Sea of Cortez is a picture of serenity: turquoise waters lapping against rose-tinted bluffs and soft sand beaches. But down below, beneath the water’s surface, a war is raging.

Each year, typically between late November and May, huge gillnets — some stretching more than 600 meters (2,000 feet), or the length of five and a half football fields — are dropped into the waters to catch totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi). This critically endangered species is illegally fished for its prized swim bladders, which can fetch prices between $20,000 and $80,000 per kilo in China. While gillnets are highly effective at catching totoaba, they also catch just about everything else, including another critically endangered species: the vaquita (Phocoena sinus).

The vaquita is a bathtub-sized porpoise with silvery-gray skin and panda-like eyes that lives exclusively in a small section of the northern Gulf of California, close to the town of San Felipe in Baja California, Mexico. Right now, experts say there may only be about nine vaquitas left, despite the Mexican government spending more than $100 million to aid its recovery. 

And it’s not the fishers deploying the gillnets that are the biggest threat to the vaquitas — it’s the people organizing the illegal trade of totoabas behind the scenes. They’re the ones placing the gillnets into the fishermen’s hands. https://news.mongabay.com/2021/02/in-the-fight-to-save-the-vaquita-conservationists-take-on-cartels/

“The government still hasn’t given us a solution or an effective way to support our families without going out to fish illegally,” said Ramón Franco Díaz, president of a federation of fishing cooperatives in San Felipe, a town alongside the vaquitas’ habitat. “The children need food and clothes.”

 Illegal fishing in the area is widespread and happening in plain view. Even as a team of scientists from Mexico and the United States arrived in San Felipe for this year’s count, it appeared to continue unabated.

“They’re going extinct because of human activities, even though it could be avoided,” said Jorge Urbán Ramírez, a biologist who runs the marine mammal research program at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur. “It’s not a priority.”

READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/climate/vaquita-mexico-extinction.html 

 and https://whc.unesco.org/en/news/2304