The Vaquita Is Down to Ten: Can the World’s Smallest Porpoise Be Saved?

Photo: Unsplash (free-use license).

The Vaquita is the world’s smallest porpoise and, almost certainly, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. The latest acoustic survey put fewer than ten individuals in the upper Gulf of California. We’ve been covering this species for more than a decade. Here’s where things actually stand in 2026, what’s been tried, and what — uncomfortably — looks unlikely to work.

What a Vaquita actually is

If you haven’t seen one — and you almost certainly haven’t — the Vaquita (Phocoena sinus) is a small, shy porpoise. Adults are about 1.5 metres long and weigh roughly 50 kilograms. They have a stubby, blunt body, dark eye-patches, and a charcoal back that fades to grey on the flanks. They live nowhere except the northernmost reach of the Gulf of California, in shallow, turbid water along the coast of Mexico’s Sonora and Baja California states.

The species was first described in 1958, off bones found on a beach. We have, as a global research community, never had a single Vaquita in captivity for more than a few hours. Capture trials in 2017 ended with a captured female dying of capture stress, and the in-situ programme was shelved.

The number: under ten

The 2024 Vaquita acoustic survey — the gold-standard count, conducted from a research vessel by the Comité Internacional para la Recuperación de la Vaquita (CIRVA) — detected sound signatures consistent with between 6 and 10 individuals. Visual confirmation that year identified at least one mother–calf pair, which is the single thing that has kept the conversation open. The genetic load is severe, but recent work on Vaquita genomes suggests the species carries less of the deleterious-allele baggage you’d expect for a population this small. In other words: biologically, recovery is not impossible. The constraints are political.

For context: the IUCN listed the species as Critically Endangered back in 1996. There were an estimated 567 individuals at the time. The collapse from ~600 to under 10 has happened in 30 years.

Why the species is collapsing: gillnets, totoaba, and the supply chain you can’t see

The Vaquita is being killed by bycatch — drowning in gillnets set by small-boat fisheries in the upper Gulf. The fish that drives the gillnet effort isn’t a species most readers will know: the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), an enormous croaker that lives in the same water. Totoaba swim bladders — the dried buche — sell for thousands of US dollars per kilogram in mainland China, where they’re used in traditional medicine and prized as luxury gifts. The totoaba is itself critically endangered, and the trade is illegal under both Mexican law and CITES Appendix I. None of that has stopped the supply chain.

The Vaquita doesn’t eat totoaba. It just lives in the same water, and its body plan is exactly the wrong size for a totoaba gillnet to ignore. This is one of the cleanest cases of cross-species bycatch in the modern record.

What’s been tried

Gillnet bans

Mexico has, on paper, banned gillnets in the Vaquita refuge multiple times since 2015. Enforcement has been the chronic problem: small-boat fishers operate at night, the refuge is large, and the monitoring fleet is a fraction of what would be needed to make the ban real. The Mexican navy now runs patrols inside the “Zero Tolerance Area” — a small box of water where any vessel is presumed illegal. Net retrieval inside that box has improved markedly. Outside it, less so.

Capture-and-translocate

The 2017 VaquitaCPR programme attempted to capture surviving individuals into a sea-pen sanctuary. After the loss of a captured female, the programme’s veterinary team called it. We’ve covered similar small-cetacean conservation challenges in the Amazon; the underlying problem — small, shy odontocetes with very high stress responses — is the same.

Alternative fishing gear

WWF, NOAA, and Mexican fisheries agencies have run a multi-year effort to develop fishing gear (suripera nets, modified trawls) that can catch shrimp without catching Vaquita. The technical work is solid. Adoption has been slow because the alternative gear is more expensive, less efficient, and, crucially, can’t catch totoaba — which is the unspoken core of the local fishing economy.

Demand-side interventions in China

Less reported but more important. The Vaquita won’t be saved at sea; it will be saved or lost by what happens in mainland Chinese consumer markets. Demand-reduction campaigns for totoaba buche have started to land — there are signs that prices have softened — but it’s slow and the data is patchy. Sea Shepherd and several Chinese NGOs have been working this beat.

Can it be saved?

The honest answer: probably not, on the current trajectory. The math is unforgiving — at fewer than ten individuals you can lose the species in a single bad fishing season. The hopeful answer: the genome work, the persistence of mother–calf pairs, and the existence of a clear single threat (gillnets in a single place for a single market) means that if enforcement gets real, recovery is biologically plausible. We have seen species come back from comparable lows: the northern elephant seal once dropped to about 20 individuals.

But “if enforcement gets real” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Mexican federal government, the U.S. NOAA, the Chinese consumer-protection apparatus, and a network of NGOs would all have to row in the same direction at the same time, and history suggests they don’t.

What you can actually do

• Don’t buy totoaba product, ever, in any form. The trade is illegal under CITES and you have no way to authenticate a “legal” piece.
• If you fish or eat shrimp, support fisheries certified for low-bycatch gear. The relevant certifications are Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Seafood Watch.
• Donate to the small set of organisations actually doing on-the-water net retrieval and demand-reduction work. Sea Shepherd, Museo de la Ballena, and the Vaquita-focused work inside WWF Mexico are the ones we follow.
• Read the IUCN status assessment directly. The Vaquita entry on the Red List is updated regularly and is a better source than most news coverage.

Why we keep writing about a species with ten individuals left

Because the Vaquita story is the cleanest test case of whether modern conservation systems — international treaties, satellite enforcement, demand-side interventions, captive breeding — can save a marine mammal. If we can’t save this one, with everyone in the world watching and a single, identifiable threat, the question of what we can save in the marine realm gets a lot harder.

For the longer arc on small cetaceans, see our coverage of marine wildlife and our reporting on the dolphin and porpoise family. For background on how endangered-species protection is supposed to work, Esme’s piece on U.S. enforcement covers the policy side.

If you have field observations, photographs, or reports from the upper Gulf, we’d love to hear from you — contact form here.

— Priya Mahato, marine wildlife