Saving Seafood

US files 1st USMCA environment case on Mexico over porpoise

February 11, 2022 — The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office filed the first environmental complaint against Mexico Thursday for failing to protect the critically endangered vaquita marina, the world’s smallest porpoise.

The office said it had asked for “environment consultations” with Mexico, the first such case it has filed under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade pact. Consultations are the first step in the dispute resolution process under the trade agreement, which entered into force in 2020. If not resolved, it could eventually lead to trade sanctions.

Mexico’s government has largely abandoned attempts to enforce a fishing-free zone around an area where the last few vaquitas are believed to live. Nets set illegally for another fish, the totoaba, drown vaquitas.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that “USTR is committed to protecting the environment and is requesting this consultation to ensure Mexico lives up to its USMCA environment commitments,” adding “We look forward to working with Mexico to address these issues.”

Read the full story at AP News

Lawsuit demands Trump administration to impose vaquita-related sanctions against Mexico

June 11, 2020 — The Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Welfare Institute have sued the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump in an effort to force it to implement sanctions against Mexico for its failures to protect the highly endangered vaquita porpoise.

The CBD and AWI said the sanctions are “long overdue,” accusing the U.S. Department of the Interior of failing to respond to a 2014 petition they filed under the Administrative Procedure Act requesting the United States “certify” Mexico under the U.S. Pelly Amendment for Mexico’s “ongoing failure to halt illegal fishing of and international trade in endangered totoaba fish.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Mexico extends gillnet ban to help save endangered porpoise

June 1, 2017 — Mexico’s agriculture and fisheries department says it is extending a ban on gillnets in much of the upper Gulf of California as part of an effort to save the endangered vaquita porpoise.

A Wednesday statement from the department says it will continue to provide monetary and other support for fishermen affected by the measure.

Despite Mexico’s campaign to help the porpoise species, estimates of remaining vaquitas have dropped below 30.

Vaquitas are often caught in nets illegally set to catch totoaba fish, whose swim bladder is prized in China.

The World Wildlife Fund says the measure won’t be enough to save the vaquita. It says a permanent ban and recovery efforts are needed.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Southern Illinoisan

In Mexico, Fish Poachers Push Endangered Porpoises to Brink

March 1, 2016 — In 2013, Song Shen Zhen, a 75-year-old resident of Calexico, California, was attempting to re-enter the United States from Mexico when border patrol noticed a strange lump beneath the floor mats of his Dodge Attitude. The plastic bags beneath the mats contained not cocaine, but another valuable product: 27 swim bladders from the totoaba, a critically endangered fish whose air bladders, a Chinese delicacy with alleged medicinal value, fetch up to $20,000 apiece. Agents tracked Zhen to his house, where they discovered a makeshift factory containing another 214 bladders. Altogether, Zhen’s contraband was worth an estimated $3.6 million.

The robust black market is grim news for totoaba — but it’s an even greater catastrophe for vaquita, a diminutive porpoise that dwells solely in the northernmost reaches of the Gulf of California, the narrow body of water that extends between the Baja Peninsula and mainland Mexico. Since 1997, around 80 percent of the world’s vaquitas have perished as bycatch, many in gill nets operated by illegal totoaba fishermen.

Today, fewer than 100 vaquitas remain, earning it the dubious title of world’s most endangered marine mammal. Scientists fear the porpoise could vanish by 2018. “The possible extinction of the vaquita is the most important issue facing the marine mammal community right now,” says Barbara Taylor, a conservation biologist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

The vaquita — “little cow” in Spanish — is a creature of superlatives. Not only is it the most imperiled cetacean, it is also the smallest, at less than five feet long from snout to tail, and the most geographically restricted: Its entire range could fit four times within Los Angeles’ city limits. Prominent black patches ring its eyes and trace its lips, giving Phocoena sinus a charming, panda-like appearance. The porpoise, which typically travels in pairs or small groups and communicates using rapid clicks, is famously cryptic; conservationists recently went two years without documenting a single sighting. Some Mexican fishermen insist the vaquita is already extinct, photographic evidence notwithstanding.

Read the full story at Yale Environment 360

CALIFORNIA: Disappearing Porpoise: Down to 97 and Dropping Fast

June 19, 2015 — CALIFORNIA — The world’s most endangered porpoise is disappearing much faster than previously believed, according to a new report from the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita.

Found only in the northern Gulf of California, the remaining 97 vaquitas are threatened by gill-net fishing. Despite an emergency two-year ban enacted by the Mexican government in April, fishermen still use the nets.

Recent data from acoustic monitoring show that the species is declining by an average of 30 percent a year — much higher than the previous estimate of 18.5 percent, which scientists said was the steepest decline of cetaceans on record.

Read the full story at the New York Times