Baja California, Mexico - In recent decades, the sleek, wide-eyed vaquita porpoise has been pushed to the brink of extinction by poachers pursuing another critically endangered sea creature, the totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder sells on the Chinese black market for thousands of dollars. The porpoises end up caught in nets intended for the totoaba and killed as collateral damage.
The vaquita (its name is Spanish for "little cow") is a toothed whale and the smallest of all cetaceans; a full-grown female can measure just five feet and weigh only 75 pounds. Thousands of vaquitas once plowed the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, which is bordered on the east by the Mexican mainland and on the west by the Baja California peninsula. Today, their numbers are estimated at around 10 but no more than 22 in the wild.
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There is little time left to act to save the vaquita, yet there is hope. For Mexico's new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the fate of the little porpoise represents political opportunity and the chance of failure. He can do nothing and preside over the first sea mammal extinction in North America in decades. Or he can save one of Mexico's national symbols and rescue a troubled fishing industry.
"This is doable even now," said Brooke Bessesen, a conservationist and author of a new book, Vaquita: Science Politics and Crime in t
