The Vaquita: The World's Most Endangered Marine Mammal

The vaquita is a small porpoise found in exactly one place on the planet, the northern Gulf of California in Mexico. It’s also considered the most endangered marine mammal alive, with a population that has collapsed from the hundreds down to single digits in under three decades.

A Species on the Edge

The vaquita was only discovered by scientists in 1958. According to the Marine Mammal Commission, it’s the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean species. Surveys estimated roughly 567 individuals in 1997. By 2024, that number had collapsed to as few as eight, according to SeafoodSource.

Why the Vaquita Is Disappearing

The vaquita’s decline isn’t caused by hunting, habitat loss from development, or climate change directly. It comes down almost entirely to one thing: illegal gillnet fishing.

Fishers in the region set gillnets to catch totoaba, another endangered fish whose swim bladder sells for extremely high prices on the black market, largely for use in traditional medicine in China, as reported by Mongabay. Vaquitas are roughly the same size as totoaba and frequently become tangled in the same nets as unintended bycatch, drowning as a result.

Mexico banned gillnets in the vaquita’s range back in 2016, but enforcement has been inconsistent, and illegal fishing has continued largely unchecked in much of the vaquita’s habitat.

A Small Sign of Hope

The most recent surveys offer a cautious reason for optimism. A 2025 monitoring effort using acoustic and visual tracking recorded between 7 and 10 individual vaquitas, including sightings of one to two newborn calves, according to Sea Shepherd Conservation Society data. It’s a fragile improvement, but it suggests the population hasn’t yet crossed an irreversible threshold.

Researchers are cautious about reading too much into small year-to-year fluctuations, since vaquitas move in and out of survey areas. Still, evidence of new calves is considered a meaningful, positive signal.

What Conservationists Say Needs to Happen

Scientists who have studied the species for decades are direct about what it will take to save it. Lorenzo Rojas Bracho, a researcher who has worked on vaquita conservation for over 30 years, told CNN that the core problem is straightforward: to save the vaquita, bycatch has to end, and to end bycatch, gillnets have to be eliminated entirely from the region, something that hasn’t happened despite years of bans and international pressure.

Proposed solutions include:

• Round-the-clock enforcement of the existing gillnet ban
• Providing fishers with vaquita-safe alternative fishing gear
• Continued international pressure through organizations like CITES
• Expanded acoustic monitoring to track the remaining population

Frequently Asked Questions

How many vaquitas are left? Recent surveys estimate between 7 and 10 individuals remain, though exact counts are difficult given how elusive the species is.

Can the vaquita still be saved? Researchers say recovery is biologically possible if bycatch mortality is eliminated, since surviving individuals have shown they can still reproduce.

The vaquita’s story is a stark example of how a single, preventable human activity can push an entire species to the edge of extinction in less than a lifetime.