Vaquita.tv

In October and November, 2008 Chris Johnson of earthOCEAN participated in an international survey to find the last vaquita. He met with and interviewed people directly involved (scientists, fishermen and conservationists) and documented the implementation and outcome of a complex plan to save the vaquita from extinction.

The government of Mexico 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 are significant.

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) therefore requested 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 planned and 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 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).