‘We can’t stop now’: Baby vaquita gives hope for species, but extinction ‘inevitable’ unless nets go

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Their main threat comes from entrapment in illegal “gillnets” - flat fishing nets suspended vertically in the sea - which have caused the population to plummet from nearly 600 individuals in 1997.

Fishermen set gillnets to catch totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China and can fetch thousands of euros per kilogram.

“Unless enforcement of the fishing ban is effective and the theft of equipment is stopped, acoustic monitoring cannot collect data as it has in the past,” the report states.

Researcher Barbara Taylor called on Mexico to sink more concrete blocks to snag nets, because some of the vaquitas were seen outside the protected area.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration has largely declined to spend money compensating fishermen for staying out of the vaquita refuge and not using gillnets.

Pritam Singh, Sea Shepherd’s chairman, said that patrols with the Mexican Navy have reduced the number of hours that fishing boats spend in the restricted zone by 79 per cent in 2022, compared to the previous year.

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