Fishing ban urged to help save porpoise

Mexican authorities faced calls on Monday to ban all fishing in the upper Gulf of California or permanently prohibit gillnets to save the vaquita marina, the world's smallest porpoise, from extinction.

Concerns about the vaquita's fate rose on Friday when scientists warned that only 60 of the sea creatures were left and could vanish by 2022 even though the navy has been patrolling their habitat.

In reaction, the World Wildlife Fund called for a full fishing ban in the vaquita's northwestern Mexico refuge.

The porpoise's population had already fallen to fewer than 100 in 2014, down from 200 in 2012, according to scientists at the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita.

The vaquita's fate has been linked to another critically endangered sea creature, the totoaba, a fish that has been illegally caught for its swim bladder, which is dried and sold on the black market.

Poachers use illegal gillnets to catch the totoaba. The vaquita, a shy 1.5-meter-long cetacean with dark rings around the eyes, is said to be the victim of bycatch.

President Enrique Pena Nieto imposed a two-year ban on gillnets in April 2015 and increased the vaquita protection area tenfold to 13,000 square kilometers.

Pena Nieto also deployed navy reinforcements to enforce the ban.

The government is compensating fishermen to the tune of $70 million over two years for giving up gillnets while new methods are sought.

But Omar Vidal, Mexico director of the World Wildlife Fund, said the measures have been "insufficient" and that fishermen have "camouflaged" gillnets with other legal nets.

'Completely crazy'

An immediate fishing ban, he said, "can save the vaquita."

"It's a drastic measure but maybe the most efficient way is to prohibit fishing and obviously compensate fishermen," he told a news conference.

Mexico's environment ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Antonio Rodriguez Pena, president of the fishing cooperative of the port of San Felipe, said his group would lodge a complaint before the United Nations if a fishing ban were to be imposed.

"They are completely crazy," he said, noting that legal fishing includes corvina and clams and local fishermen are already in a "crisis".

"They should just declare (the vaquita) extinct because fishermen are not killing it," Rodriguez said, adding that other factors are to blame, such as predators, red algae or toxins.