Mexico Pays Fishermen to Save Porpoises

The endangered vaquita porpoise has an unlikely new group of friends: commercial fishermen who were previously accidentally trapping and killing the animals while trying to catch shrimp, mackerel and sharks.  The Mexican government is paying 800 fishermen in the northernmost area of the Gulf of Mexico to stop fishing with nets and, in some cases, stop fishing altogether.

From The New York Times:

Probably no more than 150 vaquitas survive, conservationists say. The population could fall to 100 in a couple of years. If that occurred, there would be too few sexually mature adults left for the species to recover.

“We have one or two years,” said Omar Vidal, the director of the World Wildlife Fund in Mexico and a biologist who has studied the vaquita for 25 years. “We’re on the brink.”

The Mexican government agrees. It has spent about $20 million over the last two years on conservation measures, primarily to persuade 800 of the 4,000 registered fishermen in the area to accept its offer to stop using nets or to cease fishing entirely, according to the environment minister, Juan Elvira Quesada. Next year, officials hope to spend an additional $13 million to continue the plan.

Many of the fishermen who accepted the offer say they’ll use the money to start new businesses, but for those who wish to keep fishing, there’s a new net available developed with help from the World Wildlife Fund that won’t trap the vaquita.

Now, that’s the way to work together to protect endangered animals.  Hopefully this last-ditch effort will work, because they’re running out of time. A cousin of the vaquita, the Chinese river dolphin, was declared extinct last year.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Cetacean Society International

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