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Loopholes in a new Mexican law intended to deter poaching have undermined effective prosecution. Furthermore, the state’s institutions are notoriously infiltrated by organized crime. Baja California is experiencing a significant rise of criminal violence as large drug trafficking groups battle anew over turf. Significant problems are emerging with Mexican Navy patrols, including allegations of corruption and disinterest in enforcing what is seen as an unfair ban. Distinguishing between poaching and fishing for legal species is difficult. Many more gillnets are being used this year, and poachers have become far more brazen. The most effective means of protecting endangered species is preventing bycatch. The Challenges of Bans and Enforcement in the Sea Even if this initiative succeeds, it’s only a temporary solution. This strategy poses significant challenges: no one has ever kept a vaquita in captivity, and locating them in the wild is a massive undertaking. As a result, the international scientific body tasked with the species conservation recently made the risky decision to capture some remaining vaquitas and hold them, ideally to breed, in captivity until threats in the wild abate. This has been supplemented by patrols by an environmental NGO, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which has removed at least 100 gillnets.ĭespite this intensified law enforcement, totoaba poaching has continued unabated, with disastrous side effects for the vaquita population. Under international pressure, the Mexican government sought to increase law enforcement, imposing temporary bans on the use of gillnets, which ensnarl many other species, including the vaquita that within minutes drowns in them, and deploying three Mexican Navy ships to patrol the Sea of Cortez against poaching.

Chinese traders and Mexican organized crime groups became involved with smuggling the fish into China-with the help of local fishermen whose families often participated in totoaba fishing before the 1975 ban, under the cover of legal fishing for other types of fish. The totoaba has been listed as endangered and its fishing has been banned since 1975 however, with the totoaba bladder fetching as much as $60,000 per kilogram in Chinese retail markets, on par with rhino horn and cocaine, this did not deter Chinese traders.

#GONE FISHIN ORDER CHAOS ONLINE SKIN#

As a result of dwindling local supplies of “maw” (a large fish bladder believed to cure skin and circulatory ailments and boost fertility), demand skyrocketed for a similar fish with a large bladder, the totoaba, which is found in the Gulf of California. But the recent catastrophic collapse results from demand for large fish bladders for TCM. The vaquita population has struggled for decades due to incidental capture in fishing and shrimp nets.

Today only some 30 vaquitas remain in the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, a precipitous decline from 60 a year ago, and a 90 percent decline since 2011. Its extinction would represent the first extinction of a marine mammal since the 1970s. Implementing effective solutions to all these issues has proven enormously difficult, and time looms critically over the fate of the vaquita.

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