Vaquita Population Surveys
Tracking the health of the world's most endangered marine mammal once meant brief, occasional expeditions to a remote corner of the Upper Gulf of California. The vaquita porpoise has been pushed to the brink by the totoaba trade - an illegal fishery targeting a fish whose swim bladder sells for tens of thousands of dollars on the Chinese black market. Vaquitas are not hunted; they drown as bycatch in the gillnets set for totoaba, a fish almost exactly their own size. Those gillnets remain the species' single greatest threat.
For nearly three decades, scientists have returned to these waters to gauge the species' health and viability. The vaquita is the smallest porpoise on Earth - roughly five feet long, pale gray, with dark rings around the eyes and dark lips that earn it the nickname "panda of the sea." It lives nowhere else in the world but this single stretch of sea, which makes every survey a complete census of a species found in just one place.
Dr. Barbara Taylor & Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho
The surveys bring together an international team of scientists, anchored by two researchers who have worked the count since 1997: Dr. Barbara Taylor, who led the marine-mammal genetics program at NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center and serves as the IUCN's Red List authority for cetaceans, and Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, Mexico's leading vaquita researcher and chair of CIRVA, the international recovery committee. Their visual survey methods work hand in hand with the acoustic-monitoring program led by Mexican scientists, and together the two streams turn each season's detections into the population estimates the recovery effort depends on.
These surveys are led by the Government of Mexico - SEMARNAT, the Navy (SEMAR), and the natural protected areas commission CONANP - in partnership with Sea Shepherd and an international team of scientists. Sea Shepherd's role is to provide the platform: the only large vessel operating year-round inside the Vaquita Refuge, giving scientists and Mexican authorities a secure base for the annual count. The Navy seeds the core habitat with anti-gillnet hooks and leads enforcement, CONANP leads the acoustic monitoring, and Sea Shepherd's crews support logistics, vessel operations, and net removal. Because that platform is now deployed year-round, the surveys can happen more regularly and reliably than ever before, keeping the species' core habitat - the Zona de Tolerancia Cero (ZTC) - free of the gillnets that threaten it. Read more about the campaign ›
Recent surveys put the vaquita population at around ten remaining, and have documented calves and at least one likely-pregnant female - an encouraging sign that the species could stabilize even at a very small size, as has happened with the California condor and the red wolf.
The Survey in Pictures
A Population Vanishing From the Map
Each dot stands for one vaquita from that year's survey. Drag the slider to watch the count fall from hundreds across the gulf to a handful in a single stretch of sea.
About this map: Each dot stands for one vaquita from that year's survey; dot positions are illustrative, not real sightings (exact locations are withheld to protect the animals from poaching). The early figures (1997 to 2015) are range-wide abundance estimates. The recent figures (2019 onward) are the minimum number of different vaquitas seen in a much smaller search area, determined by expert elicitation, not population estimates; a full 2025 abundance estimate is expected in 2026. The two kinds of number are not directly comparable, and scientists have not called a firm population trend since 2019. Dots fill the full refuge in the early years and concentrate in the northwest in recent years, reflecting both where vaquitas are now detected and where surveys have focused; vaquitas are also using habitat between the protected zone and the refuge's western edge, which researchers say needs added protection. Sources: NOAA Fisheries and the IUCN-CSG / IUCN-MMPATF vaquita survey reports.
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