Vaquitas are found only in the Northern Gulf California and occasionally found near the Gulf of Mexico. They are labeled critically endangered and are one of the most endangered animals on the planet. Marine biologists believe that there are only 10-20 individuals left and we’re very close to losing them forever. The reason they are so endangered is they accidentally get entangled in the gillnets set for totoaba and drown because they can no longer swim to the surface to breath. Conservation efforts led to the introduction of a ban on gillnets in vaquita habitat back in July 2016, but illegal fishing continues, and the threat remains. 

Vaquitas are hard to find which makes it hard to research them. They are found only in the Northern Gulf of California and occasionally found near the Gulf of Mexico. If they go completely extinct, they will affect their food and their predators. Large sharks, like the Great White, and then killer whales will be affected. Vaquitas feed on small fish, crustaceans (such as shrimp), and cephalopods (such as small squid and octopuses) so they will also be affected and the result is growing in population. Vaquitas weren’t discovered until 1958 and a little over a half century later, we are making their number in population decrease by a lot. 

In order to try and save the Vaquitas, the Mexican government temporarily banned gillnet fishing in their home back in April of 2015. The only way to save them is for the government to stamp out the illegal totoaba poaching and trade and remove all nets from the vaquitas’ home. With doing so, people living near there will no longer be able to fish with those materials and will have to learn a new style of fishing. People could be informed about the vaquita and can donate to charities that save ocean wildlife or you can adopt a vaquita! If everyone donates and some adopt, we should hopefully be able to save the vaquitas! Scientists could try to tag some of the vaquitas to figure out their lifestyle and where they live and their feeding habits to see how to keep them safe. However, it will be difficult to tag them since there are so little of them left and they’re hard to find. I’m going to go into a little more detail about donating.

If everyone donates to save the species and some people adopt them, we could all come together and save the vaquitas. It’s the least we could do since we’re the ones who made them critically endangered. To donate, you could either do a one time donation or you could do a monthly donation. There isn’t a set number of money that the charities want, every dollar counts. I found this website that gives you a lot of information on how we can save the vaquitas (located at the bottom). We can adopt one, we can just donate, or we can buy merchandise and the money will go towards saving these little porpoises. It’s only $25 US dollars to adopt and when you do the process, it gives you information about the porpoise and why they’re going extinct.

https://porpoise.org/save-the-vaquita/

Thank you for reading my story. I hope it gave you a little more information about vaquitas.