The Next Watch: Training San Felipe to Save the World’s Rarest Porpoise

San Felipe, Mexico · Vaquita Refuge

The vaquita is the smallest porpoise in the world, and the rarest. It lives in one place only: the shallow waters at the top of the Gulf of California, off San Felipe in Baja California, Mexico. Only a small number remain, and finding one means scanning a restless sea for a dark fin that appears for a heartbeat, then slips back into the water.

For years, that work has belonged to a small circle of professional observers. This May, Sea Shepherd joined Mexican scientists and the San Felipe community for something different: not a survey to count vaquitas, but a campaign to train the next generation to find them from the deck of the M/V Seahorse, the ship that anchors Sea Shepherd's year-round presence in the Upper Gulf.

Why This Was Training, Not a Survey

2025 was a landmark year for vaquita research: more than 190,000 hours of underwater acoustic recording across numerous devices, plus a two-ship visual survey, now being analyzed for a new population estimate.

After three years of working alongside the San Felipe community, the science team began training a new generation of vaquita observers, most of them young people from the town that shares these waters. The work builds on decades of commitment from the veteran observers and scientists who gave their time, skill, and patience to this species through long days at sea and years of careful study. They helped develop the field techniques that make the vaquita possible to find, follow, and protect. Now those skills are being passed to the community that knows these waters best.

Learning to See

Eight community trainees spent ten days at sea aboard the M/V Seahorse, a ship steady enough to hold heavy binoculars level in a meter of swell. They learned on the "big eyes," tripod-mounted 25-power binoculars that can be used to pick a fin out of the chop more than a mile away. The trainees took turns beside professional observers who corrected their technique and called bearings to a recorder.

Spotting a vaquita takes more than sharp eyes. Trainees learned to write the detailed observer narratives that scientists later use as evidence, and practiced expert elicitation, the method observers use to agree on how many animals and calves were actually seen during a sighting and throughout the survey. When the sea was too rough to search, they studied footage of past sightings and wrote up what they saw, comparing notes as a group.

Reading DNA From the Water

The training was not limited to spotting vaquitas at sea. Before performing at-sea observations from the M/V Seahorse, community members and reserve staff spent two days learning environmental DNA, or eDNA, a method that can confirm a species is present from the genetic traces it leaves in the water, even when no one sees the animal. They practiced the full process, from collecting a bucket of seawater to turning the DNA inside it into a readable result.

For a species as rare and difficult to see as the vaquita, that matters. Visual sightings can be limited by wind, waves, distance, and the brief seconds an animal surfaces. eDNA gives scientists another way to read the water itself, adding evidence that can complement visual observations and acoustic detections. It does not replace the observers scanning from the big eyes or the acoustic work already guiding the search, but it can help strengthen the picture of where vaquitas are still present and which areas need continued protection.

What the Sea Allowed

The weather did not cooperate. Where 2023 and 2024 offered days of glassy calm, this May offered none. High winds and heavy swell ran the whole campaign, and in that water a vaquita is invisible more than eighty percent of the time. The team logged only three sightings, each a few seconds to about a minute, none in conditions calm enough to launch a boat for photos or for eDNA.

But no photos are not no vaquitas. Underwater detectors listening for the porpoise's high-frequency clicks recorded 72 acoustic encounters over the period, comparable to the past two years. The animals are still there. In all three sightings, observers described a single healthy adult in good body condition, and one veteran was reasonably sure he had seen one of them in an earlier season, matching it against a photograph from 2019.

The Finding That Matters Most

The most important result was about location. All three sightings, and the strongest detections, came from the northern edge of the protected core and the waters northwest of it, the same area where vaquitas gathered in September 2025. That stretch lies largely outside the zone Mexico guards with concrete blocks and hooks built to snag illegal gillnets, the gear that has driven the vaquita to the brink. It is also home ground for a female named Frida, documented in 2025 with a calf just over a year old, proof the species is still breeding.

Weather kept the team from relocating her. But the message from two seasons of survey data is now unmistakable: the vaquitas that remain keep gathering in the one stretch of their range left unprotected. The scientists' call is direct. Extend those blocks and hooks into the northwestern waters, and treat it as a matter of utmost urgency.

Passing the Watch

The campaign ended without the photographs everyone wanted. What it built instead may matter more. Eight young people from San Felipe now know how to stand a watch on the big eyes, write the narratives that hold up as evidence, and read the water for eDNA. Two will be chosen for the next full survey. Knowledge that once lived with a handful of experts is starting to belong to the community that lives alongside the vaquita. That is how a species this rare is kept from vanishing: one steady pair of eyes and techniques handed to the next.

The 2026 Vaquita Campaign was led by Mexico's National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP), with support from the Mexican Navy (SEMAR), the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), the artisanal fishers of San Felipe, university scientists, specialized non-profits such as Pronatura Noroeste, and Sea Shepherd, which provided the M/V Seahorse and co-funded the effort.