Great News. The vaquita porpoise, the world’s rarest marine mammal, swimming right on the edge of extinction, appears to be hanging on. Conservation measures in Mexico to save the endangered porpoise may be working.    

The New York Times reports that an international team of scientists estimated that at least 10 vaquitas remain in the Gulf of California, the waters that separate Baja California from the Mexican mainland. The porpoises are found nowhere else and have been driven to the brink of extinction by drowning in gill nets, a type of fishing gear that drifts like a huge mesh curtain, catching fish by their gills. Dolphins, sea turtles, and vaquitas get stuck, too, dying when they can’t surface to breathe.

“Today, we have good news, hopeful news,” María Luisa Albores González, Mexico’s secretary of environment and natural resources, said at a news conference announcing the survey results.

While ten surviving animals may seem to be a perilously small number, the estimated number of vaquitas in the new survey was similar to the previous one, conducted in 2021. What has changed is that increased enforcement by the Mexican Navy has decreased gillnetting in a highly protected zone known as the zero-tolerance area by more than 90 percent.

The navy has started working more closely with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a nonprofit organization that patrols the region looking for gill nets. And last year, the navy took a major new step, dropping a grid of 193 concrete blocks with protruding hooks, designed to entangle gill nets, in the zero-tolerance area.

“A lot of very experienced people thought that the vaquita would be gone by now,” said Kristin Nowell, executive director at Cetacean Action Treasury, a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the vaquita from extinction. “The fact that it’s doing better than expected gives Mexico one more chance to get this right.”

Threatened Mexico vaquita porpoise resists extinction