The Gulf of California, just four hours from my home in Tucson, Arizona, is a wonderful place to escape to during hot landlocked summers.
French conservationist Jacques Cousteau dubbed it “The Aquarium of the World.” In 1987, his team captured never-before-seen footage of the Gulf’s sea lions, sharks and great diversity of fish. I think about this every time I swim in its waters or eat the local seafood: Will we ever understand all its riches? Around 10% of the species are found nowhere else on Earth, and Cousteau warned us years ago about the dangers of excessive commercial and illegal fishing.
Mexican scientists have been concerned about one particular bycatch: the vaquita, a porpoise found only in Gulf of California’s northwesternmost tip, an area that’s just under 900 square miles of the approximately 62,000-square-mile Gulf.
We know little about them: Adults can reach five feet and frequent shallow coastal waters, eating fish, squid and sometimes krill. Unlike dolphins, which they resemble, vaquitas are shy, avoiding vessels and surfacing briefly before returning to their secret underwater lives. This makes studying them challenging for scientists used to collecting data from boats or onshore.
The scientific community only learned about vaquitas in 1958, when two American zoologists found a skull on a beach. Almost three decades later, a whole carcass turned up. By then, experts speculated that the vaquita was disappearing fast — the most endangered marine mammal on Earth.
IN 1997, there were an estimated 567 vaquitas, and scientists predicted they would be extinct by 2021. Every year, the odds increase that this little porpoise will vanish. And yet, it persists, along with multiple campaigns to save it.
In 2023, I traveled to the Baja California town of El Golfo de Santa Clara, a sparsely populated area peppered with estuaries and wetlands near a desert devoid of tourists. There, I met Carlos Tirado, the leader of a regional federation of small-scale fishers, who told me that “99% of the local population” engaged in subsistence fishing. In this little corner of the “world’s aquarium,” the vaquita also finds its nourishment.
Tirado saw a dead vaquita when a fellow shrimper caught it in his gill net in 2014. It was beautiful, he said, with dark rings around its eyes and mouth. Mexican newspapers estimated there were only 11 or 12 vaquitas left at the time, based on echolocation recordings and rare sightings.
“Of course, I wouldn’t want the vaquita to disappear,” Tirado said, adding that he believes fishers have a right to earn a living.
In the early ’90s, the Mexican government created a protected area near the Golfo de Santa Clara coast that permits some commercial fishing. The vaquita population seems to have stabilized since then, hovering around 10 individuals. Sea Shepherd, a global conservation organization, patrols its range. But fishers and environmentalists still disagree over the use of gill nets.
MYRIAD EFFORTS — cross-country interventions, collaborations, funding — have been dedicated to saving the vaquita, maybe even encouraging its reproduction in captivity. Many are devoted to saving it, yearning to understand it before it’s gone.
Conservation isn’t just a race against extinction: It is a story of determination, even when you can’t always see what you’re trying to preserve.
In 2017, three years after Tirado saw the dead vaquita, the Mexican government and a San Diego-based conservation foundation launched VaquitaCPR, an emergency rescue mission to capture and temporarily relocate as many vaquitas as possible to a marine sanctuary off the Gulf of California coast. They only caught two: A young vaquita that showed signs of distress and was released. The other, an adult female, went into shock and died. The most ambitious such program to date, became “a setback for vaquita conservation,” according to VaquitaCPR scientist Barbara Taylor.
Conservation isn’t just a race against extinction: It is a story of determination, even when you can’t always see what you’re trying to preserve.
VAQUITAS ARE BELIEVED to have lived in the Gulf of California for 2.5 million years, even though we’ve only known about them for decades. A long game of observation and interventions, conservation is always a bet against previous mistakes, often a progress- and-setback scenario full of mysteries and surprises. The vaquita’s story exemplifies this, time and time again.
Nonetheless, recent efforts to tell the vaquita’s story, nourish cross-border scientific collaboration and curb illegal fishing through education programs and alternative job opportunities seem to be paying off. I met a number of fishers who were aware of the vaquita’s range and vulnerabilities and eager to engage in sustainable fishing to do right by the sea that feeds them and their families. Yet this February, the Mexican government announced plans to shrink the area in the Upper Gulf of California where gill nets are prohibited by 85%, bowing to fishers’ demands. Conservation groups are sounding the alarm again: Two steps forward, one step back.
The latest findings suggest that vaquitas may survive, even with a reduced genetic diversity, if illegal fishing ends. One theory suggests its population has been relatively small, yet resilient all along. We simply don’t know enough about the enigmatic creature — either about its mating behavior or its actual population.
We do know that females give birth to a single 2-to-3-foot-long calf around March every other year. Last October, two acoustic and visual monitoring projects confirmed there were around 10 vaquitas — a small number, but one that remains steady, rather than showing a continuous decline. In a drone video released by Sea Shepherd, there is also recent proof of new calves: footage showing a mother and her baby coming up for air ever so briefly before they swim next to each other playfully and then disappear into the bright turquoise depths.
Suddenly, the vaquita became real — not just for conservationists and local fishers, but for millions around the world. This little porpoise isn’t a collection of facts. It’s not yet a story of extinction in real time, but one of lessons — about conservation, collaboration, and the importance of advocating for an extraordinarily elusive species. Lessons that must be as tenacious as the vaquita itself.
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This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The resilience of the elusive vaquita.”
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