MEXICO CITY — So few of Mexico’s vaquita porpoises remain that the international committee to protect the endangered species is preparing to catch and enclose as many as it can in a last-ditch effort to save them from extinction, experts said Thursday.
It will be a risky effort, because the species has never been held successfully in captivity.
According to rough estimates, only about three dozen of the world’s smallest porpoise remain in the upper Gulf of California, the only place it lives. With population numbers falling by 40 percent annually — there were 60 alive a year ago — there could now be as few as eight breeding females left.
Fishermen lured by Chinese demand for a fish that swims in the same waters have defeated Mexico’s efforts to protect the vaquita in its natural habitat.
Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, chairman of the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita, said an international team is being formed to launch the capture program in the spring.
“It would involve locating them, capturing them and putting them in some kind of protective area,” Rojas-Bracho said, adding that the current plan envisions putting them in a floating enclosure or pen in a protected bay where they would not be endangered by fishing nets.
“Locating them, capturing them, there is an inherent risk to everything,” he said, noting, “we have to do something, as an emergency measure.”
Rojas-Bracho said the committee is establishing a group of experts in acoustic monitoring, porpoise capture, veterinary medicine and other specialties to carry out the effort.
“The team is the best that can be put together in the world. It is the ‘dream team,”‘ he said.
Mexico’s environment department said a research team had been dispatched in October to find appropriate sites for the enclosure and had identified two such sites.
But catch-and-enclose is risky; the few remaining females could die during capture, dooming the species. Breeding in captivity has successfully saved species such as the red wolf and California condor. But the vaquita has only been scientifically described since the 1950s and has never been bred or even held in captivity.
Experts also worry about what will happen if the flagship protected species of the Gulf of California is removed. Local fishermen who can earn thousands of dollars illegally catching the totoaba fish, whose swim bladder is a prized delicacy in China, have chafed at the restrictions and Navy patrols that limit their fishing to protect the vaquita. If the porpoise is gone, fishermen may descend in droves and finish off the totoaba and other species.
“The species is at risk, but so is the whole ecosystem,” Rojas-Bracho said.
For those reasons, experts such as Omar Vidal, Mexico director of the World Wildlife Fund, oppose the capture plan.
