Vaquita – Last Chance for the Desert Porpoise

As in the Baiji’s (Yangtze River Dolphin’s) case, the future of the vaquita is no longer a scientific issue.

We know the problem, therefore the answer seems relatively simple: the nets must come out of the water. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho stresses the need to take care of the fishermen if we want to take care of the vaquita. He feels the highest priority is to finalize a comprehensive plan to buy out all entangling nets. This is the only solution for the vaquita.

The government of Mexico has developed a plan to remove entangling nets from the vaquita’s range, compensate fishermen with alternative livelihood options, and enforce net removal. The impact of these activities on local fishing communities will be significant and because of this, a critical part of the conservation plan is to monitor the vaquita population over time.

Acoustic methods have been identified as the best monitoring strategy because vaquita are difficult to detect visually (group size is small, they avoid ships, they spend little time at the surface). Unfortunately, currently used acoustic methods are not adequate to monitor a species as rare as vaquita. Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ecología (INE) has therefore gained collaborative support from the international scientific community, NOAA Fisheries included, to develop new autonomous acoustic monitoring methods.

In response to this invitation, US and Mexican scientists together with expert acousticians from Great Britain, the United States and Japan conducted a research cruise in the fall of 2008.

The objective of the cruise was to develop, test, and calibrate an acoustic monitoring system that: can cover a sufficient part of the vaquita range to reliably detect trends in abundance with the objective of being able to detect a 4%/year increase as “positive growth” within a 10 year period (this is a 50% population increase if maximum growth rates occur).