The crew of a vessel involved in a campaign to protect the critically endangered vaquita porpoise in Mexico says it was fired upon Sunday by poachers.
Capt. Jacqueline Le Duc of the M/V Sharpie says in the accompanying video that her crew was surrounded twice by angry fishermen in the Sea of Cortez, and that at one point crew members heard what sounded like gun shots.
Viewers can hear the possible reports of weapons at 49 seconds. Subsequently, when the footage is slowed, viewers can see splashes, possibly from bullets, well short of the ship. Nobody was injured during the confrontation.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdcb9IRELK0]
“It just shows how aggressive the poachers are here, and it proves to us that they are armed, and that we need to take every [skiff] that we come across seriously, because we have no idea what they’re capable of,” Le Duc says.
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The M/V Sharpie is one of four Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessels working in conjunction with Mexico to patrol a vast area in the northern Sea of Cortez, or Gulf of California, and remove gill nets set by fisherman to snag a type of fish called totoaba.
Totoaba swim bladders are sold on the black market in China for up to $10,000 per bladder, and illegal fishing operations inside the Vaquita Refuge are directed largely by Mexican drug cartels. The nearly invisible gill nets pose a grave danger to vaquita, whose numbers are said to be fewer than 20.
The skiffs, referred to as pangas, are speedy and not easy to detect. Their crews set gill nets inside protected waters at night and hope to retrieve them before they can be found by authorities.
Sea Shepherd, whose ships typically have Mexican authorities on board, have retrieved several illegal nets since it launched Operation Milagro in 2015.
Monday morning’s encounter was not the first scary confrontation involving angry fishermen. In January 2019 Sea Shepherd captured footage of fishermen racing alongside the M/V Farley Mowat, hurling objects and attempting to foul the ship’s propellers with nets.
The vaquita porpoise, the world’s smallest cetacean, is endemic to the northern Sea of Cortez. The estimated size of the vaquita population in 1997 was 600, but they’ve been in sharp decline for decades, thanks mostly to the use of indiscriminate gill nets.
–Tom image is courtesy of Sea Shepherd; vaquita image is courtesy of Tom Jefferson/NOAA