Vaquita – Last Chance for the Desert Porpoise

From the first description of the species in 1958, more than 34 years passed before action directed toward vaquita conservation finally occurred in 1992.

Earlier, several management actions indirectly benefited vaquita and/or its environment (reviewed in Secretaría del Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y Pesca [SEMARNAP] 1995).

On 2 March 1992, the government created the Technical Committee for the Preservation of the Vaquita and the Totoaba.
This group recommended provisions for protecting vaquita, including the creation of a reserve for the species. On 10 June 1993, the Biosphere Reserve of the Upper Gulf of California and Delta of the Colorado River was declared (Secretaría de Pesca 1994), and in 1995 the management plan for this reserve was published (SEMARNAP 1995).

In 1994, the formal acknowledgment that the vaquita is a species in danger of extinction represented a fundamental change in the policy of the Mexican government toward vaquita. SEMARNAP listed the vaquita on its priority list of species subject to
special protection and conservation (Conservación y Recuperación de Especies Prioritarias; Programa de Conservación de Vida Silvestre y Diversifi cación Productiva en el Sector Rural, 1996–2000; Dirección General de Vida Silvestre, Instituto Nacional de Ecología, 1997).

In 1997 the Mexican Government, through its National Institute of Fisheries, created the International Committee for the Recovery of Vaquita (Comite Internacional para la Recuperacion de la Vaquita [CIRVA]) with scientists
from Europe, North America, and Mexico. The goal of this team was to draft a recovery program based on the best available scientific information.

In its first meeting the recovery team concluded, after reviewing and analyzing potential risk factors, that incidental mortality in gillnets represented the greatest immediate threat to the survival of the species (Rojas-Bracho and Jaramillo-Legoretta 2002).

Later, in its second meeting CIRVA recommended the following:

On 29 December 2005 the “Program for the Protection of the Vaquita” was published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación, the Mexican Federal Register. The main components of the program were the declaration of a Vaquita Refuge Zone and the transfer of $1 million to the state governments of Baja California and Sonora to implement actions within the
Vaquita Refuge Zone.

However, the measures failed due to a lack of specific terms of reference regarding a compensation scheme (see Rojas-Bracho et al. 2006).

In 2007, the president of Mexico announced the Conservation Program for Endangered Species (Programa de Conservación de Especies en Riesgo), which initiated specific Species Conservation Action Programs (Programas de Acción para la Conservación de Especies) for a list of selected species, including vaquita within the top five.

Despite all these well-intentioned government declarations, little was done in practice to protect the
vaquita until 2008). [LINK TO VAQUITA RECOVERY PLAN]

After the Biosphere Reserve’s management plan was published, no decisive actions were taken to regulate fisheries bycatch within the reserve areas where vaquitas are most commonly found. Furthermore, about 40 percent of vaquitas occur outside the boundaries of the Biosphere Reserve. The Program for the Protection of the Vaquita established the Vaquita Refuge Zone in 2005 that included most of the vaquita habitat, but fishing in that zone continued through 2007 with little change. In fact, the number of pangas fishing with gillnets roughly doubled after CIRVA recommended that the number of pangas be capped
and that vaquita bycatch should be reduced to zero as soon as possible. The implementation of a real
vaquita refuge failed because of a lack of enforcement and a lack of an adequate compensation plan or economic alternatives for the artisanal fishermen who depend on that area for their livelihoods.

Source, excerpt from:

Barlow, J., L. Rojas-Bracho, C. Muñoz-Piña, and S. Mesnick. 2010. Conservation of the vaquita (Phocoena sinus) in the northern Gulf of California, Mexico. Chapter 15 in: R. Q. Grafton, R. Hilborn, D. Squires, M. Tait, and M. Williams (eds.) Handbook of Marine Fisheries Conservation and Management. Oxford University Press, New York. 770pp.