Featured Image Credit: World Wildlife Fund
There isn’t a lot more time for the world’s smallest porpoise. With officially LESS THAN 30 of the tiny cetaceans left in the world, it’s not going to be long before they’re officially extinct.
While there have been quite a few “last-ditch efforts” to save them, such as the Navy and their dolphins guiding them to safety, drone surveillance to attempt to catch those responsible for vaquita deaths, and even a two-year ban on gillnet fishing— the leading cause of their deaths.
But even that hasn’t saved them.
The gillnets haven’t been intended for the vaquita, of course, but for the endangered totoaba fish: a species of fish that’s known for and valued for their swim bladders, which are sold in Chinese markets and are used as ingredients in soups. The vaquita are then caught by these nets, though, and often can’t get free, causing them to drown.
So a gillnet ban was placed, and the vaquita are still dying because of them? Yep. Because that ban has been pretty hard to enforce when fishing vessels continue to use them, anyway.
So now? The World Wildlife Fund is calling for a ban that will be a little bit easier to enforce, although it’s a little bit more extreme: an immediate and indefinite ban on ALL fisheries within the tiny cetacean’s habitat.
While that would be risky for the Mexican government to do, especially economically, it could work, at least until another solution was found, such as “vaquita-safe fishing gear”, something the group’s message also suggested.
The WWF also called for the U.S government to do its’ part to attempt to save the vaquita, asking them to “take swift and decisive action to stop transborder shipments of totoaba products and calling for the Chinese government to immediately stop the illegal transport and sale of totoaba products.”
We’re very close to losing the second cetacean species after the 2006 extinction of the Chinese river dolphin. And as the WWF put it: “We cannot allow this to happen.”