February 9, 2016 โ The international trade in exotic animal parts includes rhino horn, seahorses, and bear gall bladders. But perhaps none is as strange as the swim bladder from a giant Mexican fish called the totoaba.
The totoaba can grow to the size of a football player. It lives only in the Gulf of California in Mexico, along with the worldโs smallest and rarest mammal โ a type of porpoise called the vaquita.
Now the new and lucrative bladder trade threatens to wipe out both animals.
โPeople in Asian cultures use the swim bladder in a soup called fish maw,โ explains Erin Dean at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Itโs also reputed to have some medicinal value โ itโs thought to boost fertility.
Dean says no one knows why the demand for it has skyrocketed recently. It could be that when a Chinese fish called a yellow croaker, which once supplied bladders, started dying out, people started turning to the Mexican totoaba to meet the demand for bladders.