The Poachers Who Could Save Mexico’s Vaquita

Article body copy

Plenty of families avoid certain topics of conversation. For Eduardo and his brother, work is off limits.

“He has his job, and I have mine,” Eduardo says from the kitchen table of his mother’s house in the fishing town of San Felipe, in northwest Mexico. “I’m not interested in what he is doing, and I’m not going to tell him, ‘Tomorrow, I’m fishing totoaba.’” That’s because catching totoaba—a silvery fish that grows bigger than an average man and is found only in the Gulf of California—has been illegal for five decades, and Eduardo’s brother works in the Mexican navy, which patrols local waters to intercept poachers.

“I don’t want to mix anything up,” Eduardo says. He has agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity (Eduardo is not his real name)—less from the fear of official prosecution than from the threat of recrimination from cartels. Mexican cartels work with international gangs smuggling totoaba to China, where the fish’s swim bladders are coveted for traditional medicinal purposes and have sold for a higher price than cocaine or caviar.

Totoaba poaching has not only jeopardized totoaba but drawn international scrutiny for driving the vaquita—a porpoise similar in size to the totoaba, also endemic to the Gulf of California—to near extinction. Most totoaba poachers use gillnets, which they leave out for several hours under the cloak of darkness. The sheets of strong polyethylene netting hang vertically like walls in the water and stretch roughly 500-meters long. Gaps in the mesh are sized to ensnare adult totoaba but are equally dangerous for other big animals, from turtles to sharks to porpoises.

Google “vaquita” (Spanish for “little cow”) and you’ll see more photographs of dead animals than alive ones. Black rings around their eyes make vaquita look sleepy, but their gray, crescent-shaped bodies are often hatched with cuts from a frenzied fight against the netting that drowned them. To protect both species, Mexico criminalized totoaba fishing in 1975, then banned all gillnets, including for smaller species such as shrimp, within the upper Gulf of California in 2017. Yet a voracious overseas market for totoaba bladders meant that neither totoaba fishing nor gillnets ever left San Felipe: totoaba fishing just became totoaba poaching. And vaquita numbers have continued to dwindle. Scientists estimate they spotted between six and eight vaquita during a 2024 population survey, down from the eight to 13 they detected in 2023. The species is believed to be the most endangered marine mammal on the planet.

The plight of the vaquita has made San Felipe a global focal point for people concerned with preserving biodiversity. Eduardo is, evidently, not among them. With almost boyish excitement, he tells me about the time 20 hammerhead sharks entangled themselves in his gillnet. He remembers decapitating them to fit all the bodies on board, then selling them for a good price in town. Like many in San Felipe, he has doubts the vaquita even exists. (“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I’ve only ever seen the one picture taken by the government.”) Nonetheless, he now finds himself the unlikeliest talisman for a controversial, last-ditch attempt to save the vaquita from extinction.

That’s because, unlike most poachers, when Eduardo takes his crew of three out at night over the flat Gulf waters in a small motorboat in pursuit of totoaba, he now leaves his gillnets on shore. The men catch the fish with cimbra instead, a series of baited hooks on a long, floating line. Then they kill and gut the fish for their bladders as normal. No vaquita are harmed.

For decades, conservationists and Mexican authorities have attempted to save the vaquita by policing totoaba poaching, often with military zeal. Their tactics have sometimes led to violent clashes with fishers. Now, encouraged by recent evidence that there are more totoaba than previously thought, some renegade conservationists say a small and informal group of poachers like Eduardo could be part of the solution for saving vaquita and quelling the conflicts. They want authorities to tolerate, if not legalize, totoaba fishing in San Felipe, provided gillnets disappear for good.

Kristin Nowell, a conservationist from the United States who has combated endangered-species trafficking for decades and founded the vaquita-protection charity Cetacean Action Treasury (CAT) in 2020, is one of the leading advocates of using cimbra to catch totoaba. In her view, totoaba poaching is so ingrained in San Felipe that it is unrealistic to eliminate it from the town altogether.

Some sources say only a few dozen poachers work in the murky, volatile totoaba trade from year to year, while others insist the majority of San Felipe’s roughly 2,000 fishers have at some time pursued the fish for their coveted bladders. Many fish legally by day and illegally at night. San Felipe has an official port, with a naval fortress overlooking it, and an unofficial docking point, tucked beside the touristy malecon (promenade). Almost every day during peak totoaba season when the weather is fair, trucks pull skiffs called pangas up the beach at the foot of an abandoned discotheque, then onto the road and away, full of gillnets and fish.

Nowell insists it’s time to stop trying to enforce totoaba fishing out of existence and start exploring legal gray areas. Authorities, she argues, should just crack down on what’s most harmful to vaquita (gillnetting) and tolerate totoaba fishing equipment that spares them (cimbra). Essentially, she’s pushing for harm-reduction policing in the conservation arena: don’t declare a war on drugs; support safer ways of getting a fix. “It’s just a way to more efficiently allocate your resources,” she says.

The idea is that local poachers could protect their income and avoid the heat if they swapped their nets for hooked lines. The bladder trade would keep flowing, so there’d presumably be no kickback from the cartels. And, ideally, the vaquita could take the opportunity to stage a comeback.

Like legalizing drugs such as cannabis, the idea of tolerating totoaba fishing is controversial. CAT has like-minded allies in at least one other NGO but so far is the only organization advocating this vaquita-safe poaching approach. Sea Shepherd, the international conservation organization that has long been entrusted by the Mexican government with patrolling vaquita habitat and reporting poachers to the navy, is staunchly opposed to totoaba fishing—with any equipment—as long as it’s illegal. Plus, there’s fear from scientists that decriminalizing totoaba fishing, whatever the method, could entice more people to target the fish, putting unsustainable pressure on a species that the government still officially considers highly endangered. Meanwhile, many poachers are reluctant to put down their nets to take a chance on catching totoaba with cimbra.

Eduardo is a young man who avoids eye contact and answers most questions at the start of our conversation with monosyllables. His late-father’s friends taught him to fish as a teenager. The first year, he’d go fishing every day, and every day he became violently seasick. “I’m going to become a fisherman because I like it,” he’d repeat to himself, until he got over the seasickness. Hearing this, his mother laughs at the stove. I laugh, too, until I see Eduardo is not.

“When you love it, you put up with everything: the dizziness, the sleepless nights, everything that goes with fishing.” He is suddenly very earnest. “For me, the beauty of life is the sea, is fishing. I’ve been to many places. I’ve looked at many things. Nobody can tell me anything about the sea I don’t know.” He looks up. “Happiness is the tranquility the sea gives you.”

Like many young fishers, Eduardo started with legal but less-lucrative catches of shrimp and corvina (a meaty bass-like fish) and soon added totoaba. He ruined the first bladders he cut out, until his buyer corrected his technique. Eduardo doesn’t care why the bladders are so expensive or who wants them. “I just care that they keep buying so I have money to give to my daughter, my wife. Nothing else,” he says, thumbing the wooden beads of a rosary around his neck. “The more money, the more you want.”

In The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway’s crusty Cuban fisherman tells the fish he hopes to catch: “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” I see the same friction in Eduardo: how he holds his love for the sea next to the violence he inflicts on its inhabitants. For him, totoaba is a beautiful fish to be respected and enjoyed but ultimately subdued. When he’s in pursuit of totoaba, other sea creatures are just collateral damage. For CAT, that’s why Eduardo is so important: precisely because he couldn’t care less about the vaquita.

Fishing for totoaba with hooked lines dates back much further than this latest push. The technique was common when San Felipe was settled in the 1920s, until fishers discovered the relative ease of gillnetting. They can catch hundreds of fish at a time with a gillnet (and don’t have to buy smaller fish for bait)—or just 20 to 30 if they use hooks. The trade-off, Eduardo says, is that with hooks, his crew can fish selectively, targeting more of the larger, breeding females that will hungrily take the bait. Their bladders—bigger and thicker—sell for more back on land.

Eduardo, who learned about the benefits of fishing totoaba with cimbra from a friend, makes the same amount of money with those few dozen bigger fish as he would with hundreds of smaller totoaba. “I also enjoy it more, because when you pull in, the fish haven’t died and you fight for the fish and you feel the emotion,” he says.

Eduardo hasn’t needed CAT to nudge him toward cimbra fishing, but his peers have. Maria Alicia Tejeda Argüelles runs CAT’s community outreach in San Felipe and is converting poachers to cimbra one conversation at a time. Because poaching is a sensitive subject, she focuses on connecting with fishers she has met before: from one of CAT’s other programs, from her own work as an independent filmmaker, or just from living in San Felipe. Often she’ll introduce herself as a filmmaker and ask to go out with fishers in a boat to record the crew at work for her own documentary project or CAT’s social media. On the water, with nothing but the sound of seabirds overhead, she broaches the subject of totoaba. Only if the crew already poaches totoaba with gillnets does she casually pitch the idea that they transition to cimbra fishing.

Crucially, Tejeda never mentions vaquita. Instead, she focuses on the cash cimbra can reel in. Eduardo, who met Tejeda a few years ago before she joined CAT, recognizes that the conservation group is preaching the vaquita gospel, but he hardly sees himself as a proselyte. “That’s another way of life,” he says, when I ask his impression of conservationists. “They have their job to save the vaquita, but I have my job of fishing to give to my family.”

CAT doesn’t pay Eduardo to fish with cimbra, just encourages him to use the gear when he goes totoaba fishing so others can see that it works. And the charity asks him to introduce other fishers to Tejeda every so often.

CAT has amassed an evolving, informal group of about 20 vaquita-safe poachers since starting to promote cimbra early in 2024. That number fluctuates, though; because of the long, adversarial dynamic between poachers and conservationists in the region, many fishers are suspicious. One week, a good conversation might open the door for Tejeda to a new group of poachers; the next, others start dropping her calls. “We gain trust and then suddenly we lose it,” she says.

And some fishers simply won’t ditch their tried-and-true methods. “What can I say?” Eduardo shrugs. “They don’t want to change the gear they have fished with all their lives. They’re stubborn.”

To Tejeda, 20 vaquita-safe poachers represent a promising start. In 2022, a local sustainable fishing nonprofit, Pesca ABC, started a hooked-line program for legal catches of fish such as corvina. To make the smaller catches profitable, the nonprofit had to drum up a premium market, teaching a slaughter technique traditionally used for sushi to keep the fish ultra-fresh. The initiative got a lot of publicity, but only one fish market in a nearby city could consistently move the more expensive product, so by spring 2024, participation had dwindled to two crews.

A viable market is “the final step we’re missing,” Pesca ABC’s field coordinator, Felipe Ignacio Rocha Gonzales, says from the organization’s base in San Felipe. “Money talks.” The cheat code of vaquita-safe poaching is that it taps into an already existing premium—read, black—market.

The vaquita-safe poachers haven’t yet attracted the attention of authorities, but Tejeda hopes to grow her group to 50 fishers by 2025. In anticipation, Nowell is informally introducing the idea of tolerating totoaba cimbra fishing to authorities, but with no significant progress yet. Those conversations can be touchy, Nowell says, but she’s not starting from scratch. When the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) met to discuss totoaba in 2021, harm-reduction strategies were on the agenda. Like Nowell, officials at the meeting compared the idea to drug-use interventions, imagining a scenario where fishers could swap their gillnets for cimbra just as intravenous drug users might swap paraphernalia at a needle exchange.

“Anyone accepting (cimbra poaching) would need to be aware that they put themselves at risk of violating the law,” the official meeting summary reads, but it adds that providing the equipment could help with “getting some of the most threatening nets out of the water.” The task force that floated the idea dropped it, though, recognizing that promoting cimbra may not reduce the overall amount of poaching, and that it would be challenging to confirm whether fishers had given up their gillnets.

Julián Escutia, head of Sea Shepherd’s Mexican branch, says tolerating totoaba poaching would be misguided. “The focus should be more on protecting wild totoaba rather than trying to exploit it again,” he says, noting that Sea Shepherd has committed to following the lead of Mexican authorities. “Our position is that we are asked by governments to come to countries and help save endangered species. In this case, the vaquita and totoaba are two endangered species.”

What’s more, the same selling point that makes hooked-line poaching attractive for fishers like Eduardo could devastate totoaba numbers without careful monitoring and regulation, says Miguel Angel Cisneros-Mata, an ecologist with the Mexican Institute for Research in Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture, who studies totoaba. Poaching with cimbra only makes financial sense because breeding females with the largest, most valuable bladders take the bait. But Cisneros-Mata’s research shows that for totoaba—as is the case for most fish species—big, old, fat, fertile female fish (affectionally called “BOFFFFs” by fisheries scientists) produce exponentially more eggs than younger, smaller females. Targeting BOFFFF bladders could undercut the totoaba’s ability to reproduce and may be “very concerning” for the species at large, says Cisneros-Mata, even if it is an improvement on gillnetting.

Tejeda’s response to this is straightforward. There are, she insists, enough totoaba today for the species to survive targeted poaching. Experts, including Cisneros-Mata himself, have begun to suspect that there are many more totoaba than previously believed. The population is not necessarily increasing, but new research shows they were likely never that endangered in the first place.

In 2020, a team of ecologists led by Cisneros-Mata re-evaluated totoaba’s status on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) Red List of Threatened Species for the first time in a decade. Drawing together other research and their own data, the team found two main reasons to be hopeful. First, genetic testing carried out in the 2010s and confirmed in 2023 suggests that the species has a strong, diverse dating pool. It would be hard to find that diversity, says Cisneros-Mata, if the species were truly endangered.

Second, in 2020, Cisneros-Mata’s team found totoaba 400 kilometers farther south than the previously known range of the fish. It’s unknown, he says, whether the southern fish represent a natural expansion or the success of a captive-breeding program. From 2015 to 2019, totoaba farms released almost 700,000 fish (some off La Paz, at the bottom of the Gulf) into the wild to help boost the population. Farmed totoaba are genetically tagged, but Cisneros-Mata’s research team didn’t carry out the genetic testing that would have identified the southerly fish as wild or captive born. Regardless of whether the expansion is natural or not, it supports the theory that totoaba are not as desperately endangered as scientists thought they were a decade ago, when the population was estimated solely from catch data.

On that basis, Cisneros-Mata’s team demoted totoaba two ranks on the IUCN Red List, from critically endangered to vulnerable. “Totoaba are so fertile, so fecund,” Cisneros-Mata says. “They are really resilient fish.”

But disagreement lingers over exactly how much stress the species could take. Richard Brusca, emeritus executive director of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona, and one of the Gulf experts quoted in Cisneros-Mata’s IUCN reassessment, believes that totoaba should be removed from the most endangered rung of Mexico’s register, and that they are strong enough to withstand legalized cimbra fishing. “I don’t think (hook-and-line poaching) would have a seriously negative impact,” says Brusca. “If you could convince the poachers to do it, that’d be fine: it’s not going to hurt the totoaba.” And if poachers do show interest, then why keep the activity criminal? As long as the Mexican government is able to regulate it, then “for heaven’s sake, just legalize totoaba fishing,” he says.

Cisneros-Mata is more cautious. Wholesale legalization, he worries, would encourage a new wave of people to go out fishing for BOFFFF bladders. A sudden boom in totoaba fishing could have a meaningful, negative impact on the species. Fecund as the fish are, “I don’t think there’s totoaba for everyone,” he says. If fishing remains illegal, the community of fishers willing to risk fines, jail time, and the dangers that come with a violent world of organized crime would presumably remain roughly the same size, and the totoaba population would hold steady, he reasons.

While scientists debate the true vulnerability of totoaba, CAT’s strategy also strikes a raw nerve by asking conservationists and authorities to work together with poachers, after years of animosity. When the government imposes new fishing restrictions, they’re often met with protests; in recent years, the unrest has sometimes boiled over into outright rioting. In 2016, after a gillnet ban was announced, townspeople destroyed trucks and razed offices of the environmental protection department. In early 2019, Sea Shepherd’s vessel interrupted two dozen pangas poaching with gillnets; the smaller boats encircled Sea Shepherd’s vessel and doused it in gasoline and Tabasco sauce. Three months later, marines chased a suspected poacher through town before shooting him and two bystanders; in the following days, locals set navy boats on fire.

Another infamous episode occurred in 2020: during a conflict in core vaquita habitat, pangas attacked Sea Shepherd’s vessel with Molotov cocktails, and fishers say the conservation organization rammed a skiff, killing one local. Eduardo knew the local who died by the nickname Coyote. “The town rose up,” he remembers. “It got very ugly.” His mother was more afraid for his brother in the navy. “If the people come and attack you,” she told him, “throw away your uniform and get out of there naked.”

“There’s always that sense that if (poaching) enforcement really got tough without providing a practical fishing alternative that those kinds of riots and social unrest would reappear,” says Nowell. “I think that’s very clear to everybody involved.” (Escutia insists that, for its part, Sea Shepherd has embraced a more peaceful approach to interacting with locals.)

While fishers have clashed with conservationists and authorities, they are also often victims of spasms of cartel violence with unclear motives. In 2021, one of the gangs vying for control of the poaching market shot six fishers in broad daylight. Last year, a local’s body was pulled up in a gillnet with an anchor tied around his waist. Two more locals were killed just weeks after my visit, though it’s unclear whether their executions were related to fishing.

Conservationists in San Felipe like to describe totoaba and vaquita in a kind of grim embrace: one doomed by the other’s price tag. But the deaths of totoaba and vaquita have also spurred human bloodshed. So, if Eduardo and CAT’s other poachers can articulate a more trusting relationship between authorities, conservationists, and locals, it’s no overstatement that they might save human and marine lives.

After a week spent scouring San Felipe for a poacher who would speak to me, it’s almost anticlimactic to sit with Eduardo while his mother fries pork and his wife watches TV from the sofa. I’m packing up to leave when I ask Eduardo’s mother what she thinks of her son’s work as a poacher. “It doesn’t weigh on me,” she says. But she does worry about the conflicts that might await him, as she watches his panga motor out to sea from her window. “I see that he is leaving, but I don’t know if he’s going to come back.” She pauses. “I don’t sleep when I know they are going out. I just think, ‘Oh God, take care of him.’”

Over the years, conservation strategies have tended to portray poachers like Eduardo as nuisances or gun-toting vigilantes rather than participants in an economy that long predates international interest in a rare porpoise. That will have to change before there’s progress, says Eduardo—“This is my big question all the time: how can you prefer for an animal to live while the people of the town die?”

He considers himself a victim—someone just trying to survive. Somewhere out in the flat, blue waters beyond his mother’s kitchen, between kilometers of nets, Molotovs and machinations lost on them, eight weary-looking porpoises have no choice but to try and do the same.