By Heidy Martinez
In millions of years, nothing has threatened the vaquita porpoise like the last fifty years of net fishing.
Confined to a single stretch of water in the Upper Gulf of California, the vaquita has never migrated or ranged beyond this narrow habitat. In recent decades, gillnets have driven the population from thousands to fewer than ten individuals. Their only threat is entanglement—especially in nets set for totoaba, a large fish hunted for its swim bladder and smuggled to Chinese markets for thousands of dollars apiece.
The nets used in this trade are illegal and lethal. They don’t discriminate. Vaquitas, dolphins, sea turtles, and countless fish die the same way—trapped underwater, unable to surface.
Watch the net destruction process in this video, first shared with our Direct Action Crew members, whose monthly support powers our missions.
At the Mexican Navy’s base in San Felipe, we work to dismantle these confiscated nets. To most, they look like piles of tangled plastic. But to us, every net tells a story—about how it was used, when, and by whom.
Totoaba nets are usually easy to identify. They’re made with thick, durable filament and large mesh openings—sometimes as wide as eight inches. Like most gillnets, they use synthetic floats along the top and lead weights along the bottom to form a vertical wall through the water column. They’re often dyed green, brown, or blue, and are engineered to be both strong and hard to detect. These nets aren’t left behind by accident—they’re actively deployed by small crews, many operating illegally and some under the control of trafficking networks.
Other nets we recover are used to catch species like chano, corvina, or shrimp. While these may be legal in certain areas, they follow the same structure and pose the same danger when set inside the Zero Tolerance Area (ZTA)—the protected core of the Vaquita Refuge. Any net found inside this zone is subject to immediate seizure, regardless of its target species.
Some of the most dangerous nets we recover are those that drift—ripped or abandoned but still suspended like a wall in the water column. These continue to catch marine life indiscriminately, often doing more damage than nets snagged on the seabed. Nets tangled around the concrete deterrent blocks placed throughout the ZTA in 2022 tend to collapse or ball up, catching less but still posing a threat to species like fish or crabs. Both types of nets—those that drift and those that remain anchored—can kill for months or years if not detected. That’s why our crew aboard the Seahorse uses sonar, drones, and diver teams to scan the water column and seabed, recovering anything that doesn’t belong.
Once ashore, each net is stripped of floats, lead, and rigging, then processed and recycled into construction material. What once posed a deadly threat in the water becomes part of the local infrastructure—concrete, not plastic.
Since the campaign began, Sea Shepherd crews have removed over a thousand nets from the refuge. With constant patrols, detection capability, and direct partnership with the Mexican Navy, we’re keeping the pressure on. Every net recovered is one less weapon in the water.
