There are only about 10 vaquita porpoises left in the world, and they’re not going to bounce back without our help. Photo: International Whaling Commission//Paula Olson
The plight of the world’s smallest marine mammal, the vaquita, has been on the radar for a long time now. In typical human fashion, however, we haven’t exactly done much to save them, so now the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has issued the first-ever extinction alert in its 70-year history.
“We wanted, with the extinction alert,” Dr Lindsay Porter, the vice-chair of the IWC’s scientific committee told The Guardian,” to send the message to a wider audience and for everyone to understand how serious this is.”
Vaquitas are extraordinarily shy and are the world’s smallest cetacean. They’re also one of the most endangered species on Earth. With a population of only about 10, the vaquita is on the brink of extinction. At around 4-5 feet long, the vaquita is found only in the Gulf of California. As recently as 2017, it’s thought there were some 30 swimming around. Fishermen in the area are still using gillnets, which are mainly focussed on totoaba fish, so the little porpoises routinely get caught in them.
They’ve been listed as critically endangered since the mid-’90s, but despite a few efforts here and there — mostly just paying lip-service, to be honest — their numbers have continued to dwindle. Since 1996, experts have been saying that the only way to save them is to eliminate gillnets in the areas they call home. Mexico did put a two-year moratorium on gillnets in an effort to help them reproduce, but with a slower reproduction rate –about one calf every two years – more needs to be done.
“Despite nearly 30 years of repeated warnings, the vaquita hovers on the edge of extinction due to gillnet entanglement,” the IWC said in a statement.
Sea Shepard had a campaign to save them too, with a goal of $500,000, but again, it wasn’t enough to help the little animal bounce back. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kelly Slater both used their platforms to call attention to the vaquita, and rescue groups have even gone as far as using Navy-trained dolphins to find vaquitas and bring them in to a captive breeding program. The latter idea was scrapped after a female vaquita died when it was caught.
With only 10 left, there’s a very real chance that we’ll see the vaquita go extinct within a few decades, but there’s still hope. “Despite the very low number of surviving animals,” the IWC wrote, “100 percent enforcement of a ban on gillnets in their core habitat would still give this small but resilient porpoise a chance of recovery.”
