Missed Opportunity Is the vaquita's plight linked to the US government's failure to take advantage o
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Source: Earth Island Journal
The doll-faced porpoises — the world’s smallest cetaceans — are notoriously shy, avoiding boats and barely breaking the surface when they rise for air, as they must every three to four minutes. And at the time, there were likely just 245 vaquitas left in the world.
Such a sighting would be impossible today. According to Hall, no more than 15 vaquitas may now remain in the northern Gulf of California, their exclusive home range. (The last official estimate, from 2016, put the number at around 30.) Vaquita numbers have nosedived — by nearly 50 percent annually during the past six years — due to illegal fishing. “They’re unintended bycatch,” Hall explains. “Gillnets are the culprit. They’re designed to entangle fish and not let them go. Hundreds of vaquita have drowned silently, and the world just didn’t know.” Despite best efforts to protect them, it’s possible — even likely — that the critically endangered porpoise may be extinct within a year or two.
...many fishermen are after the valuable totoaba, an endangered giant sea bass found only in the central and northern portions of the Gulf of California. Totoaba swim bladders (a buoyancy organ possessed by most bony fish) are coveted in China, where they’re turned into a soup believed to enhance fertility and benefit general health. Some blame Mexico for the vaquita’s collapse. But Stephen Kohn, a Washington, DC-based attorney and the executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, argues that the United States also bears a large measure of responsibility. That’s because totoaba bladders are often smuggled through the US on their way to China.
According to Kohn, the best way to fight wildlife crime is to tap informants within trafficking groups — the poachers or the middlemen who transport illegal wildlife parts to a final destination — to help bust crime rings preying on endangered species. Enlisting whistleblowers in the Gulf and across totoaba smuggling routes, he believes, could have helped law enforcement break up what he calls the “totoaba cartel.”
Read more: http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/missed-opportunity-vaquita-whistleblowers
Save (insert your favorite species here) and the VAQUITA.
Write your representative and ask them to support using existing whistleblower laws to protect wildlife.
https://www.whistleblowers.org/campaigns/empower-global-wildlife-whistleblowers/
Help save the Vaquita. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is the only ones actively removing the gillnets that are literally walls of death.
https://seashepherd.org/campaigns/milagro/
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