Vaquita In Danger
With only 60 individual Vaquita Porpoises left in the wild, the U.S Navy is stepping in and will deploy specially trained bottlenose dolphins to help protect this vulnerable species. The dolphins are trained to search for underwater mines and detect enemy divers and the Navy hopes the dolphins will help locate surviving vaquita porpoises in Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California.
The dolphins are part of a team being assembled on both the American and Mexican side of the border. Their aim, to capture live vaquitas and transport them to a safe ocean pen of the coast of San Felipe Mexico with the hope that they might have a better chance of survival.
The project is being spearheaded by Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources as a last ditch effort to keep the critically endangered porpoises safe from illegal gill nets, where they often end up as by-catch and drown.
The operation “has to be done in a very careful, staged manner,” said Barbara Taylor, a conservation biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla.
Scientists say the vaquita population has dwindled over the past two decades — from 567 in an initial survey in 1997 to fewer than 60.
Despite a massive two-year plan launched in April 2015 by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration that includes an expanded ban on gill-net fishing in the porpoise’s habitat, the vaquita population has continued to fall, largely because of the rampant illegal fishery for totoaba, a large fish whose swim bladders fetch exorbitant prices in China.
“We can’t afford to be slow about this,” Taylor said. “We have to give this our mightiest effort as quickly as possible.”
Based in San Diego, the Navy Marine Mammal Program uses dolphins and sea lions for a range of tasks, from finding and removing underwater mines to detecting clandestine swimmers and divers in restricted areas.
Dolphins are skilled at locating things beneath the surface through echolocation, or sonar, which allows them to interpret the echoes of sound waves, as well as through their capacity for directional hearing underwater.
The operation planned for May is the latest in a series of efforts aimed at protecting vaquitas, a small porpoise that lives only in the rich and turbid waters of the Upper Gulf of California. The animals, which must surface to breathe, not only are rare but also extremely shy and difficult to spot, as they splash little, travel in small groups and avoid boats.
