Saving the vaquita
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jacques Cousteau called Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, ‘the aquarium of the world’. It is home to one of the most critically endangered species on earth. The vaquita is a small porpoise facing total extinction, whose numbers have dwindled to less than a dozen. In particular, the vaquita get caught in the nets used to catch totoaba. Casting nets for this large marine fish is illegal. But the totoaba’s swim bladder is believed to have potent medicinal properties in China, and sells for thousands of dollars in a trade controlled by Mexican organised crime. So efforts to save the vaquita have brought conflict to poor fishing communities in northern Baja California – people who often rely on an illicit income from totoaba. On New Year’s Eve, 2020 one fisherman was killed and another seriously injured in an altercation between local boats and an NGO ship patrolling to stop the sinking of illegal nets that kill the vaquita. Linda Pressly reports from the coast of Baja California on a dangerous clash of interests. Can the vaquita be saved?
Producer: Michael Gallagher Producer in Mexico: Ulises Escamilla Haro
(Image: Illustration of a vaquita in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. Credit: Greenpeace/Marcelo Otero)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So, messing around online as we do, I came across an incredibly striking picture. |
| 0:06.3 | The sun filtering down through a sea of Aquamarine, and floating in the center of the image |
| 0:11.6 | with a smiley face and blunt nose a creature that looks a bit like a dolphin but isn't it's a vacita I'd never heard of it |
| 0:20.4 | maybe you hadn't either until now and it turns out its days may be well and truly |
| 0:25.8 | numbered. |
| 0:27.4 | So here's this week's assignment on one of the world's most pressing wildlife stories. |
| 0:36.0 | He was happy fishing, |
| 0:40.0 | he was happy fishing. All his life, he loved it. And all his life he'd been fishing there. He'd never |
| 0:48.1 | had any problems before. |
| 0:51.9 | You're listening to assignment on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:55.0 | They've gone fishing for shrimp. |
| 0:59.0 | Mario had been doing that since he was very young. |
| 1:01.0 | He started when he was about 16. |
| 1:03.0 | On a restaurant terrace in San Felipe, a small fishing community on Mexico's Baja California |
| 1:09.8 | Peninsula, Ajala Toledo's telling me all about her brother Mario and his years spent working |
| 1:15.7 | the Sea of Cortez, the Gulf that divides us from the mainland. |
| 1:21.2 | And did Mario, did he ever have a permit here? |
| 1:24.0 | No, he was a free fisherman. |
| 1:28.0 | He just went wherever he could work. |
| 1:30.0 | There are plenty of unlicensed fishermen in San Felicia. work. |
| 1:32.6 | There are plenty of unlicensed fishermen in San Felipe, but they, and even their licensed colleagues |
| 1:38.1 | too, find themselves centre stage in one of the world's biggest conservation battles, a battle that's now claimed human life. |
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