Hey… it’s the holiday season and I was determined to find a good news story to celebrate what is supposed to be a happy time. There is no end of bad, sad, and just plain nasty news out there, but sometimes there are glimmers of hope. I may have found one!
A few years ago, a cynical friend complained to me that “conservation” was a useless exercise because it so often failed to meet its objectives. Species are going extinct at rates unprecedented in the last tens of millions of years and a lot of what was called “conservation” was akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic following its calamitous confrontation with an iceberg – it gives one something to do without resolving the problem.
I told him, however, that I could disprove his overall contention with two words. Those words were “whooping” and “crane.” In 1941, there were only 21 of these magnificent birds in the world. Each year since my childhood, I would eagerly await the official tally of how many there were as a massive international effort was being made to save the species. They are still a very endangered species but last year their numbers overall were over 500 and, while that is a tiny number for a species that has an enormous range, it does prove that conservation can work, with even better examples of successes out there.
Which brings me to the vaquita, which I’ve written about before. It is the world’s smallest cetacean (the collective name for whales, dolphins, and porpoises) and is found only in the Gulf of California. The greatest human-caused threat to the species has been gill nets used to capture totoaba, a locally resident fish that is itself endangered, and legally protected, but in demand because its swim bladder is in high demand for traditional Asian medicine (although how “traditional” can it be when the fish is not native to Asia?). Once more, the value of the animal is its worse threat, disproving the often heard trophy hunting contention that it is the value of an animal, dead or alive, that provides the motivation to protect it from extinction. The totoaba and very many other species prove this argument false.
Scientists have worried that, with only ten left in the wild, the vaquita was too rare to recover. So, what on earth could be the good news? Well, according to National Geographic, mothers with what appear to be viable calves have recently been seen! Not wanting to disturb them (one attempt at live capture was a disaster, with the animal dying) it’s hard to be sure of how many calves there might be, but even one is a tiny glimmer of hope; a single bright star glowing in a vast galaxy of burnt-out darkness.
On that calf, or those calves, rests the fate of the species. Will they be the last of their kind, or the turning point to recovery? The illegal nets are still being set. The dangers are real and may be exacerbated by other changes, such as the loss of fresh water flows into the Gulf, warming water, and changing populations of other species, but something is always preferred to nothing, and this is the season when we all take a deep breath, and hope for positive change for the better.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
