Vaquita have long been collateral damage for Mexico’s totoaba fishers, but conservationists believe there’s a solution. The only hitch? It’s
Excerpt from this story from Hakai Magazine:
Plenty of families avoid certain topics of conversation. For Eduardo and his brother, work is off limits.
“He has his job, and I have mine,” Eduardo says from the kitchen table of his mother’s house in the fishing town of San Felipe, in northwest Mexico. “I’m not interested in what he is doing, and I’m not going to tell him, ‘Tomorrow, I’m fishing totoaba.’” That’s because catching totoaba—a silvery fish that grows bigger than an average man and is found only in the Gulf of California—has been illegal for five decades, and Eduardo’s brother works in the Mexican navy, which patrols local waters to intercept poachers.
“I don’t want to mix anything up,” Eduardo says. He has agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity (Eduardo is not his real name)—less from the fear of official prosecution than from the threat of recrimination from cartels. Mexican cartels work with international gangs smuggling totoaba to China, where the fish’s swim bladders are coveted for traditional medicinal purposes and have sold for a higher price than cocaine or caviar.
Totoaba poaching has not only jeopardized totoaba but drawn international scrutiny for driving the vaquita—a porpoise similar in size to the totoaba, also endemic to the Gulf of California—to near extinction. Most totoaba poachers use gillnets, which they leave out for several hours under the cloak of darkness. The sheets of strong polyethylene netting hang vertically like walls in the water and stretch roughly 500-meters long. Gaps in the mesh are sized to ensnare adult totoaba but are equally dangerous for other big animals, from turtles to sharks to porpoises.
Google “vaquita” (Spanish for “little cow”) and you’ll see more photographs of dead animals than alive ones. Black rings around their eyes make vaquita look sleepy, but their gray, crescent-shaped bodies are often hatched with cuts from a frenzied fight against the netting that drowned them. To protect both species, Mexico criminalized totoaba fishing in 1975, then banned all gillnets, including for smaller species such as shrimp, within the upper Gulf of California in 2017. Yet a voracious overseas market for totoaba bladders meant that neither totoaba fishing nor gillnets ever left San Felipe: totoaba fishing just became totoaba poaching. And vaquita numbers have continued to dwindle. Scientists estimate they spotted between six and eight vaquita during a 2024 population survey, down from the eight to 13 they detected in 2023. The species is believed to be the most endangered marine mammal on the planet.
The plight of the vaquita has made San Felipe a global focal point for people concerned with preserving biodiversity. Eduardo is, evidently, not among them. With almost boyish excitement, he tells me about the time 20 hammerhead sharks entangled themselves in his gillnet. He remembers decapitating them to fit all the bodies on board, then selling them for a good price in town. Like many in San Felipe, he has doubts the vaquita even exists. (“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I’ve only ever seen the one picture taken by the government.”) Nonetheless, he now finds himself the unlikeliest talisman for a controversial, last-ditch attempt to save the vaquita from extinction.
That’s because, unlike most poachers, when Eduardo takes his crew of three out at night over the flat Gulf waters in a small motorboat in pursuit of totoaba, he now leaves his gillnets on shore. The men catch the fish with cimbra instead, a series of baited hooks on a long, floating line. Then they kill and gut the fish for their bladders as normal. No vaquita are harmed.
For decades, conservationists and Mexican authorities have attempted to save the vaquita by policing totoaba poaching, often with military zeal. Their tactics have sometimes led to violent clashes with fishers. Now, encouraged by recent evidence that there are more totoaba than previously thought, some renegade conservationists say a small and informal group of poachers like Eduardo could be part of the solution for saving vaquita and quelling the conflicts. They want authorities to tolerate, if not legalize, totoaba fishing in San Felipe, provided gillnets disappear for good.
