The remote acoustic monitoring program discussed in our previous post is not the only way that local fisherman are getting involved in vaquita conservation. The ghost net removal program also relies on participation from within the community, and this program is also having a significant impact on the vaquita issue. The program is designed to remove gillnets from the water. Some of these nets have been abandoned in the gulf (hence “ghost net”), but many are recently set illegal gillnets. The scale of this program has increased dramatically over the past five years, and it now includes numerous partners, including Museo de la Ballena, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, World Wildlife Fund, and several local fishing cooperatives.
Film crew on board one of the fishing vessels participating in the ghost net removal program.
Here’s how it works: Fisherman drive transects in their small pangas while dragging a specially designed hook, which latches onto any gillnets hidden below the water. When a gillnet is found, the fisherman place a brightly colored buoy to the net, and one of the large boats operated by either Museo de la Ballena or Sea Shepherd comes along to remove the net. Ghost nets that have been hidden underwater and abandoned often contain the bodies of long dead marine life, but recently set totoaba gillnets are often found as well, and sometimes contain living animals.
Filmmaker Tobias Corts filming as the Sea Shepherd crew pulls in an illegal gillnet.
To date, close to 1,000 illegal gillnets have been removed from vaquita habitat, and the scale of the effort has reached a point at which it is having a significant financial effect on illegal totoaba fisherman. Totoaba gillnets are expensive, and undercover research conducted by Elephant Action League (discussed in detail later in this article) has shown that some totoaba fisherman are actually going into debt because so many of their totoaba nets have been removed by Sea Shepherd and Museo de la Ballena. Without this effort, there’s a chance that the vaquita would already be extinct.