A Porpoise Is Ensnared by Criminals and Nets

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/world/americas/a-vaquita-is-ensnared-by-criminals-and-nets.html

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SAN FELIPE, Mexico — It is a rare moment when scientists can point to an animal at the edge of extinction and predict when it might disappear forever. But it is happening here, under the golden waters of the desert-rimmed sea, where a small porpoise has almost vanished.

Nobody imagined that the end would approach so quickly. What changed was the appearance of a new threat to the snub-nosed porpoise known as the vaquita: organized crime.

The vaquita, a shy marine mammal, is simply collateral damage as poachers here sweep up another endangered species, a giant fish called the totoaba, to please consumers in China. The vaquitas become entangled and die in the nets set for totoaba.

Like the Chinese demand for other rare animal parts, including shark fins, the market for totoaba is driven by customers who pay generously, in this case, for the totoaba’s swim bladder. Dried and served in soup, it is believed to have medicinal qualities.

With each kilogram of swim bladder fetching as much as $10,000 here, its sale is more lucrative than that of marijuana.

The effect of the totoaba poaching on the vaquita came as a shock to conservationists. A study released in July concluded that half of the population, which inhabits the northern reaches of the Gulf of California, had been killed in two years, leaving just 97 vaquitas.

The numbers prompted a group of Mexican and international vaquita experts to issue a dramatic warning. Without drastic steps to save the world’s smallest marine mammal, the group said, it would disappear within four years.

“It’s definitely the last call for this species,” said Barbara Taylor, a marine mammal expert who is part of the scientists’ group, the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita.

The only way to restore the vaquita, the experts said, would be to shut down the illegal totoaba trade and impose severe new restrictions on the shrimp fisheries here when the season begins on Saturday.

“We’re encouraging them to reinvent the northern gulf,” said Dr. Taylor, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “I don’t trivialize how difficult it will be. These guys making millions of dollars trafficking in endangered species are not going to go quietly.”

Nor will the local shrimp fishermen.

“They are more interested in the vaquita than in human beings,” Raúl Gutiérrez, a fisherman in this town on the west side of the gulf, said of the conservationists.

Until now, the shrimp fishermen have been the focus of the effort to protect the vaquita in the northern Gulf of California. Their long gillnets sway like curtains in the current and have been lethal to the porpoise.

Mexican officials say they are taking the committee’s recommendations to heart. Eight navy speedboats are scheduled for delivery in the northern gulf over the next few weeks, and more are expected next year. The government will start aerial monitoring with two light planes and eventually drones, said Rafael Pacchiano Alamán, an under secretary with the Mexican Environment Ministry.

But it may be the fishermen, not the poachers, who feel the rule of law first. Mr. Pacchiano said the authorities would also start enforcing regulations on the length of fishing nets: 200 meters, or about 220 yards. Fishermen acknowledge that they typically set them five times as long.

The prospect of new limits on how and where shrimp can be caught has caused anxiety in the gulf’s northern fishing villages.

Carlos Alberto Tirado, the leader of one of the fishing federations in the small town of El Golfo de Santa Clara, on the northeastern tip of the gulf, said that scientists’ recommendation to ban all gillnets across a wide area of the northern gulf would wipe out the industry.

“They deal with conservation, but they do not deal with how the communities will remain communities,” he said. “They would become ghost towns.”

Officials acknowledge that measures to save the vaquita will hurt the fishermen. “It’s a big dilemma,” said Juan José Guerra Abud, Mexico’s environment secretary. “But without doubt, the objective is to preserve it. We are looking for what kind of stimulus, what kind of support we can give to compensate.”

Conservationists argue that there is a way for fishermen to continue working without harming the vaquita, by switching to baglike trawl nets that do not snare the porpoise.

But Antonio García Orozco, a fisherman who has been working with environmental groups on the trawl net’s design, said it could not work when miles of gillnets are stretched out across the fishing grounds. “We need time and space to demonstrate that we can get 100 percent” of the catch.

The government had planned to phase in the new nets by 2016. But even the fishermen who made the switch voluntarily say they cannot provide for their families.

“We are considered the heroes of the vaquita because we were the first to change,” said Javier Valverde, 66, one of the few fishermen to have seen the elusive animal. “But we are losing a lot.”

The jolt of urgency now comes after the government has already spent about $55 million since 2007 to protect the vaquita.

It began paying compensation to fishermen for the loss of fishing grounds after an area of 1,260 square kilometers, or 486 square miles, was declared off-limits as a vaquita refuge in 2005. There was another subsidy to change to trawl nets. Then there was a payout to encourage the fishermen to switch to tourism, but few could make it work.

Still, there was progress. The population decline fell to 4.5 percent a year by 2010, about half of what it was in earlier years.

The totoaba trade reversed that, speeding up the loss to 18.5 percent a year.

The authorities on both sides of the Mexican-United States border are just beginning to get a glimpse of how totoaba smuggling works. Last year, after officials at the Calexico border crossing in California found 27 totoaba bladders hidden in Song Shen Zhen’s car, they searched his house and discovered 214 more laid out under whirring fans — a haul worth more than $3.6 million on the Asian black market, the authorities said.

Then came the June murder in El Golfo de Santa Clara of Samuel Gallardo Castro, a prosperous fisherman whom Mexican military authorities had linked to drug trafficking. A suspected hit man suggested that Mr. Gallardo was shot over an unpaid totoaba debt.

The distinction between legal fishermen and totoaba poachers is fuzzier than many here would like to admit. Indebted fishermen may find it hard to resist the temptation to solve their problems by catching one totoaba — and then another.

As they wait for the promised government action to materialize, many fishermen are skeptical it will do much good.

“Every year it’s the same,” José Luis Romero said. The promise is, “ ‘This time, really, we will put security in place.’ They go out one day, two days, and that’s it.”

Mr. Romero, with a bushy gray beard, cuts an eccentric figure in this town of cowboy boots and pickup trucks. He is different in another way. He believes that the vaquita is worth saving.

“It would be a shame if it were lost through our negligence,” he said, “ours, the fishermen.”