S5E25: The Vaquita Can Still Recover

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain errors in names, places, or technical terms.

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you.
0:00:06 - (Chris Clarke): If you want to help us out,
0:00:08 - (Chris Clarke): you can go to 90milesfromneedles.com/donate or text needles to 53555.
0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again.
0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): It's time for 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.
0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome, listeners, to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and we have a fascinating episode for you today. You might have seen recent press reports about a really disheartening census of the vaquita, which is a tiny porpoise that lives only in the northern part of the Gulf of California, surrounded on three sides by some of the most intense desert to be found in North America.
0:01:10 - (Chris Clarke): And some of that coverage has left readers with the impression that scientists counted seven vaquitas and that those are the only seven left in the world.
0:01:19 - (Chris Clarke): The actual finding is more complicated and
0:01:22 - (Chris Clarke): remarkably, somewhat more hopeful. Putting this episode together, I was pleased to find out that while the situation the vaquita faces is bad, in fact very bad, it's not quite as hopeless as the recent press coverage would suggest. Now, I spent some time earlier this week talking with Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, who is, as I say in the interview, arguably the world's leading expert on vaquitas in the scientific community.
0:01:51 - (Chris Clarke): And while he has no illusions about how desperate the situation is that the vaquita has found itself in due to our actions, he has not given up hope and he has some suggestions for what we can do to set the vaquita on a course to recovery. We just need to do one thing, and it's a big thing. It's a really difficult thing, but it is one thing that we need to do. And if we do it, our great grandchildren may be able to visit a northern Gulf of California that has hundreds of vaquitas living in it, which is news as heartening as the recent press coverage has been disheartening.
0:02:29 - (Chris Clarke): I'm very pleased to bring you this interview with Dr. Rojas-Bracho. First, though, I want to thank Serge Levy for his donation this past week. I had the pleasure of hanging out with Serge in Ajo, Arizona earlier this year at the Trinational Sonoran Desert Symposium. He's a wonderful photographer and a deep thinker about desert issues. It was really good to have a chance to talk to him for three days back in March.
0:02:53 - (Chris Clarke): If you would like to join Serge as one of our donors, you can do so by texting needles to 53555 or by navigating to 90milesfromneedles.com/donate. We try to make it as easy
0:03:07 - (Chris Clarke): as possible for you.
0:03:09 - (Chris Clarke): You can donate to us in an amount and frequency that makes sense to you, and we very much appreciate it. So let's get to our interview with Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho about the smallest, most endangered and, let's get real here, the cutest cetacean in the world, the vaquita.
0:03:54 - (Chris Clarke): I am very pleased to be talking with Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, who is arguably the world's expert on the vaquita,
0:04:03 - (Chris Clarke): which is the smallest and most endangered
0:04:06 - (Chris Clarke): cetacean in the world. Dr. Rojas-Bracho, thank you so much for spending some time talking to us.
0:04:12 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Well, thank you for the invitation. I'm very pleased to be here with you and your audience.
0:04:18 - (Chris Clarke): There's a pretty good possibility that some of our listeners have not heard of the vaquita or don't know much about it. What is the vaquita? Where is it and why is it in trouble?
0:04:28 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Yeah, vaquita is a true porpoise. That's like the harbor porpoise you have in the US and many other of these species. But this is the smallest one of all and probably the smallest cetacean in the world. One of the issues with vaquita was this relatively recent discovery as a species in 1958 by Kenneth Norris, and we didn't know how vaquita looked like, really. I mean, he found a couple of skulls in sand dunes in San Felipe, which is the—
0:05:01 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): If you imagine the Gulf of California, the northernmost part, or the Upper Gulf closes, that's the only area where vaquita live. It's not only the smallest cetacean, but probably has the smallest distribution area. And when Norris described it in 58, a few years later, he wrote a paper saying that because vaquita, it's found in an area with intense fishing activities with gillnets, it's vulnerable to bycatch or incidental mortality.
0:05:33 - (Chris Clarke): Bycatch simply means those animals that you are not fishing for that you catch by accident or incidentally or by mistake.
0:05:43 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And some years later, the first meeting of the Small Cetaceans Subcommittee of the International Whaling Commission recommended Mexico to take a look at that, because certainly gillnets anywhere in the world, gillnets and cetaceans, there's a risk of entanglement. So just to give an idea, it is estimated that 600,000 marine mammals are bycaught around the world in fishing gear, mainly gillnets. So it's not only vaquita. Now, the problem is when you have a small population like vaquita, we don't know what the population was.
0:06:18 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): A few thousand, probably. If you don't manage properly your fisheries, which we have been advising the government for years, then of course the risk of extinction increases for a small population. So what we have now is a population that when I started working with vaquita a few decades ago, our first estimate in 1997 or so, we estimated less than 600 animals. In a few decades. Now we don't know how many they are, but the minimum animals surviving that we estimate it is between 6 and 10 animals or 7 and 10 animals. That doesn't mean that's the number of or the population size estimate. That's just the minimum number of animals that are there. There might be a few more.
0:07:07 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): But that's what we estimated. And vaquita is bycaught in gillnets for shrimp, which are very small-mesh-size gillnets with a very thin filament used to build the nets all the way to large gillnets for shark or totoaba, which is a sciaenid species and is one of the big issues for vaquita. This is a sciaenid fish. The swim bladder, which is the gas organ that allows fish to float, is very well appreciated in traditional medicine in China.
0:07:37 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And the prices for that swim bladder can go up to 100,000 US for a kilogram. So it's more expensive than cocaine and probably except gold. But they really pay a lot for that and prices have come down a bit.
0:07:52 - (Chris Clarke): Now after the interview was over, I went online and I checked for the price of gold and it is more than $100,000 a kilogram. So it's more than totoaba swim bladders would bring in. It's not remarkably more expensive. As I speak, the price of gold by the kilogram is $136,544.86. Those cents are important too.
0:08:17 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And that is what really has affected vaquita. When 10, 12 years ago we started having the demand for totoaba swim bladder. And so we have there a deadly combination, which is the gillnet that the mesh size is about the size of the head of a vaquita, combined with organized crime from Mexico and crime syndicates from China to export the swim bladder. Because as I mentioned, you can make a lot of money with that and with less risk than cocaine. What we have seen is when we started working with vaquita, the population was declining about 8% per year, let's say 97 to 2008.
0:09:00 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Between 2011 and 2015, the population declined about 34% per year, and then till 2018, about 47% per year. So we almost lost half of the population every year. And in total, in the last 10, 12 years, we've lost about 99% of the population of these species. So this is probably the most rapid and severe population decline, probably for any animal population in the last centuries or at least in the last 50 years.
0:09:40 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So that's basically. But just to make clear, it's bycaught in any gillnet, but the totoaba gillnets are deadly and that's a big challenge.
0:09:47 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, so it sounds like this was not an animal that was incredibly abundant before European culture entered the arena. It's not so much a buffalo as like an Amargosa vole or a Devils Hole pupfish. You know, was even before we showed up. Sounds like it was a very sparse population.
0:10:10 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Yeah, we have. I'll take this with a grain of salt, but we have estimated between 3,000 to 5,000 animals. I mean, it's much larger than it is, but it doesn't come to population sizes as the examples you put there, or look at the population sizes of large whales before the whaling started. So. Right, yeah. So it's a small population in a small area with a small body size.
0:10:36 - (Chris Clarke): Listeners might be wondering why we are talking about porpoise in a podcast that's devoted to desert conservation and protection of the desert. And clearly the vaquita's territory is surrounded by desert. You know, Sonoran Desert, Baja Desert. If you are one of the people that separates Baja out from the rest of the Sonoran. How is the vaquita a desert animal?
0:11:02 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Yeah, well, I have a friend who calls the vaquita the desert porpoise. So there we are with the desert. So it's a very productive area because it's in the desert. It's a evaporation basin. So water evaporates, salt concentrates in the surface and then that heavy water sinks down because of the density. So when it sinks down, it brings up to the surface nutrients. And then you also have winds and upwelling areas.
0:11:33 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So at the end you have a lot of mechanisms to make it a very productive area. So vaquita lives, compared at the same latitude one of the richest areas in the world. So there's tons of food. And besides vaquita, there are other 13 species of marine mammals we have seen there, from large whales like a fin whale or Bryde's whales to vaquita and other numerous number of dolphin species. But it's the only porpoise.
0:12:02 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So being in the desert has helped vaquita in terms of living in an area that it's so productive. And of course it's very attractive for fishing and other productivity activities. So that's a key part. And I'm glad you mentioned that because few people have asked really that precise question. So all in all it helps the vaquita to have a very fertile and productive habitat.
0:12:29 - (Chris Clarke): Along those lines. It's occurred to me to wonder whether the massive changes to the Colorado River, whose delta is right there near the vaquita's territory, whether the orgy of dam building and reservoirs and siltation traps have affected the vaquita's chances of survival.
0:12:50 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): That's a great question because the Mexican fisheries authorities through the years have argued that's the risk factor for vaquita. And vaquita is declining because habitat degradation. And the argument is that the Colorado River brought nutrients into the Upper Gulf. And without the river we don't have that input. Which of course, if you had a river and then you don't have a river, there is an impact in the ecosystem.
0:13:22 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): But not all the members of this community are affected equally. We have seen that the red crab from the delta of the Colorado River—its population has declined badly. But because it's a very fertile area, even nutrients that have been stored in the delta of the river, because we have very high or very large tides, they bring nutrients into the Upper Gulf. And then you have this process that I mentioned, that heavy water sinking and bringing nutrients up and then you have upwelling because of the winds.
0:14:03 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So all in all that has not affected the productivity that would affect vaquita. Now the bad thing about this is that has been used for years or decades, since I was a student by fisheries authorities worldwide, but especially in Mexico, they deny bycatch as the risk factor, which is the main risk factor worldwide. So that's a bit of an absurd argument. So they've been using that argument not to act and protect vaquita.
0:14:30 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And one of the issues has to deal with the tuna dolphin conflict that we had years and there was an embargo for Mexico. And so fisheries authorities—anything that is bycatch—they panic. So they've been denying that. And for my PhD I wrote a paper on that. And then we wrote two more papers after that. And recently we wrote another paper also using genetics, demonstrating that vaquita is not doomed to extinction. Because that was the other argument. It's so small that it's doomed to extinction, which is not the case because lethal alleles have been purged by this population through the years. So whatever they had when they arrived to the Upper Gulf and evolved to a different species, those lethal alleles have been lost.
0:15:14 - (Chris Clarke): For the non-biology nerds among us, and I know you're out there, an allele is simply one version of a gene. Some alleles are benign or inconsequential, like those involved in determining your hair color and eye color. But some harmful recessive alleles can cause particular trouble in a very small population, because closely related animals are more likely to inherit two copies. Sickle cell disease, for example, generally develops when someone inherits the harmful variant from both biological parents. But vaquitas have apparently been scarce for so long that many of the most harmful variants were gradually removed from the population.
0:15:52 - (Chris Clarke): Their small numbers are terrifying, but the genetic evidence says they aren't automatically doomed by inbreeding.
0:16:00 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So there is no impact to vaquita. But despite all our papers, it continues to be used by the fisheries authorities. Except this new administration has changed that. Fisheries communities, of course, and fisheries scientists don't care much about conservation. Many times not all of them. So that has been like one of the main issues we have had to fight for. I mean, year by year it's always, it's like COVID, it will never go away, it stays there.
0:16:32 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): But there is no impact to vaquita. And let me mention this. Every time we go out, we see mothers and calves. Animals look healthy and you can tell cetaceans when they don't have enough food. Then you see how their body starts elongating and you can see scars and injuries. You can see this in an animal like porpoise and many other animals as well when they don't have enough food. And we have never seen that. So if vaquita are healthy and all the vaquitas we recovered from gillnets when we do the necropsy, their stomachs are full with fish and they produce milk which needs energy. And then they have the young and the young survive. We have photos of mothers that had a young and probably young that are now juveniles. And that's the most critical age for cetaceans, going from calves to juveniles. But we see them, they survive.
0:17:32 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So there's nothing to indicate that there's another risk factor besides incidental mortality in gillnets.
0:17:39 - (Chris Clarke): What do the vaquitas eat?
0:17:42 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Well, that's another good thing about vaquitas. Their menu is 21 species of fish and two species of squid. From those, there are about 10 that are the most frequent. It means that vaquita has an option to eat many other things.
0:17:58 - (Chris Clarke): So it sounds like while the fisheries industry is directly injuring vaquitas through gillnetting, they're at least maybe not posing a threat through competition for the food source.
0:18:12 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Yeah, and the main issue with vaquitas, with other marine mammals are the main threat are these artisanal fisheries. So this is not a big industry. I know it encompasses the artisanal fishermen. So that's the main issue. And then of course, having said that, you don't want fishermen to go extinct. You want to keep the communities and have vaquita. And this has turned to be very challenging because the gillnets are ideally designed of course for the Upper Gulf of California. That's why everybody used them.
0:18:47 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And so the alternative to protect vaquita is work jointly with the communities to find alternative fishing gear. And during many decades and many administrations, the administration never accepted or said that it was bycatch. So they have never really helped to design alternative fishing gear. So we created the International Committee for the Recovery of Vaquita that I chair and we made a recommendation to contact international experts and create an expert committee on fisheries technologies. And ICOFT was created, really, by someone that was working for WWF and he left WWF, but he has continued to work with this group. And now finally the government is working jointly with the committee to find alternative fishing gear. But through the years, because the fisheries authorities denied the problem with vaquita and bycatch, they created a very toxic environment in the communities.
0:19:50 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So the message that communities receive from the fishing authorities is don't worry, go out and fish with gillnets because that's not an issue. And there we are saying no, there's a big issue and vaquita might go extinct. And then I mean there are going to be consequences, not only biological consequences, but embargoes and sanctions and all those economic things that happen sometimes when you overexploit. And the US has been very intense in that sense. And currently there's a program between the US and Mexico trying to work how to prevent the extinction of vaquita and allow fishermen to do what they want to do, which is go fishing.
0:20:26 - (Chris Clarke): You've mentioned the Mexican government's role in obstructing measures that could help the vaquita with regard to discouraging gillnetting or finding alternatives. Has the government taken any other kinds of actions that have been detrimental to the vaquita? Or contrary wise, has the Mexican government done anything in the past that has
0:20:46 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): been helpful well, on the first question, I have a very good friend and very well-known scientist. And he said the worst enemy of vaquita are not gillnets, are the fishing authorities. And that was until this new administration. We had finally a different DNA in the National Institute of Fisheries and in the Fisheries Commission, which is the management body. And so we have been working with them and that has helped, but it's still slow.
0:21:15 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): We need to move forward with more activity now. The environmental part of the government has always been helpful, not as much as we would have liked, but probably all the environmental ministers in the world are weaker politically in terms of funding, while agriculture, fisheries, industry have a lot of political power. And so that's something we have to deal with. But the new authorities in environment have also been working stronger to prevent extinction of vaquita.
0:21:48 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And people might think it's a very small population that will go extinct. And we have done some modeling using genetic information. We sequenced the DNA, the full genome of vaquita and made some models with some very really good scientists from UCLA, young scientists. And vaquita is not doomed to extinction because what I mentioned before, so there's the possibility of vaquita recovering. It's about 80% if you stop vaquitas being killed in gillnets.
0:22:17 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): But if the population goes below 10 because you didn't stop completely bycatch, then that probability comes down really badly. And so now what they've been doing, the authorities having workshops together with fishermen and trying to change the attitude, working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN or expecting a project with IUCN. The IUCN has a group on behavioral change for conservation.
0:22:48 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And so this toxic environment created in the past, that's something we have to deal with besides coming with alternative fishing gear that will work for fishers and they are happy to go out fishing and also trying to find better prices for fish that are vaquita safe.
0:23:04 - (Chris Clarke): You are not nearly as hopeless about the vaquita's future as press reports would lead people to be. What do you see as a potential likely course for the vaquita if we do get the gillnets out of the northern part of the Gulf?
0:23:19 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Yeah, I will not be alive by the time the population recovers completely. But I would be satisfied if I see the population trend being positive or at least not declining. I can die peacefully if I see that.
0:23:35 - (Chris Clarke): It's a special kind of patience and emotional strength, I think that is required to spend a career on an animal that is this threatened, this endangered. What have you learned about vaquitas as a result of your study that has pleasantly surprised you?
0:23:53 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): If anything, I think I would say, probably in a few words: Vaquitas are strong animals. If you stop killing them, they will recover. It's amazing how resilient they are. They are still hanging there despite all the problems they are facing with intense gillnetting, having no one to protect them really in terms of removing gillnets from the area they are holding there. And we wrote a paper saying that there are more vaquitas than expected.
0:24:24 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Because when we do our modeling population would have gone extinct by 2024, I think we estimated, or 2020. But we are out, and they're still there and they're producing young. So it's this capacity of vaquita to survive. It amazes me. And probably the same thing happens with other animals. If just we keep fighting and fighting. When I finished my PhD, a professor told me, Lorenzo, you don't want to spend your career with vaquita. It will condemn you.
0:24:54 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Don't turn into Mr. Vaquita or anything like that. But I have learned also through the years that you have to be there. If you are not there pushing and pushing. And I know many colleagues, they think I waste part of my scientific career doing this. But you have to be there. And I don't want Mexico to be the country that loses vaquita. We've done a good job protecting gray whales and that's probably the reason we still have gray whales despite the intense whaling.
0:25:25 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): And we have elephant seals that also were about 30 animals left. And then we have the Guadalupe fur seal also right there. So we have done those in the past. I always think we can do that in the present. I mean, as Barb Taylor said, we cannot be stupidly optimistic, but we are optimistic because the data shows that we can be optimistic.
0:25:49 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, yeah. As someone that's been reporting on this issue for a while, especially during my time at the Earth Island Institute, which is the home of International Marine Mammal Project and one of the groups that was pressuring the government of Mexico on the dolphin tuna thing back in the day. I am, I think I'm predisposed to expect bad news for large vertebrate animals. I was editing Earth Island Journal as the baiji declined and went extinct. Oh yeah, that's the river dolphin in China.
0:26:19 - (Chris Clarke): And so it's just wonderful to hear that there's no reason to give up hope for the vaquita yet.
0:26:27 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Yeah, I think I gave a conference for the Society for Marine Mammalogy. One of the questions is, what do you tell the young people coming, the young scientists? It's “Don't give up.” That's the worst thing. Even when it sounds ridiculous, when people think you're wasting your time, don't give up. That's the only thing. Because if we give up, the message you send to other fishing authorities and to organized crime, because this issue with vaquita and totoaba and crime syndicates is going to happen somewhere else because Chinese medicine has a lot of, there's a lot of money. And so there are species like totoaba in Bangladesh, in other areas. And we wrote a small paper about bycatch of marine megafauna in gillnets for sciaenid fish just because they fish them for the swim bladder. So if you give up, you send the wrong signal and say no, no. When it's difficult, we scientists just forget about it and move to something else, right? So in that sense, I think it's really important not to give up and continue your fight.
0:27:40 - (Chris Clarke): So I know that people that are listening to this, that are just learning about the vaquita or getting more information than they had before, are going to be interested in supporting your work or in supporting the work of other people, NGOs or university departments or whoever is working on the vaquita to try and get it into the 22nd century. How can people learn more about what you're doing and offer their help?
0:28:07 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Well, there's a good link to, it's called Viva Vaquita and that's Tom Jefferson's idea. So there's a lot of info. And then we're having on October 10, Vaquita International Day, with presentations. People who are interested can look at the Viva Vaquita website and there's the dates and the links and everything. So that's one thing. Now, for conservation projects to be successful, you need public opinion to be on your side.
0:28:37 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): So it's always useful, you know, writing letters to your authorities. If you're in California, wherever, saying, “We would like, we know about vaquita. We need to help. How can California help? Or how can California send the message to Mexico that is not threatening Mexico? How can we help?” We need alternative fishing gear. We need experts that are in the US and might help. Also be careful when you go to the markets and buy Mexican food. You have to make sure that, I mean, there's an embargo right now, but make sure that Mexican shrimp is not coming from the Gulf of California.
0:29:15 - (Chris Clarke): And just in case people didn't have enough reason to want to support the vaquita, given that it's the smallest and the most endangered cetacean that we have, we'll put a photo of them in our show notes because they're also quite possibly the cutest cetacean. Yeah, just really, really a beautiful animal. So is there anything that you were hoping that I would ask you that I've neglected to ask you?
0:29:43 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): No, I think you did very good questions, actually, especially that first one we started. So, no, I really want to thank you because you've been doing this for a long time and that's what we need. People like you also following the story, telling the story to wider audiences and make the vaquita plight more universal than it was before.
0:30:07 - (Chris Clarke): Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, thank you so much for joining us at 90 Miles from Needles.
0:30:13 - (Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho): Thank you, Chris, so much again for your hard work and for this interview.
0:30:18 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back for this episode's
0:30:22 - (Chris Clarke): contribution by our friend, nature recordist Fred Bell. We have Point of Rocks at night. Fred writes, this is crickets and a poorwill filling this nighttime soundscape around the King's Pool at Point of Rocks, which is inside Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Let's take a listen.
0:31:55 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. Paper maps never run out of power.
0:32:10 - (Chris Clarke): I am so grateful to Dr. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho for joining us in our virtual studio. It's so important to focus on the optimistic side of things whenever it's possible, without denying reality. Sometimes it isn't. But in this particular case, as bleak as the vaquita's prospect is, there is something we can do to help. And along those lines, I second Dr. Rojas-Bracho's recommendation that you go to the Viva Vaquita website.
0:32:36 - (Chris Clarke): That's V-I-V-A-V-A-Q-U-I-T-A dot org. There are a wealth of different pieces of information about vaquitas there. You'll probably learn something that you didn't know before. I certainly did. And very importantly, there is a banner on the front page of the website with a menu option that reads “ACT NOW.” Click that and you'll be presented with a few different things you can do to help the vaquita. Everything from writing a letter to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to boycotting shrimp and other seafood caught by gillnetting in the Gulf of California.
0:33:10 - (Chris Clarke): It seems like President Sheinbaum's heart is in the right place. Letters to her can give her the backing that she needs to follow through on things she wants to do to protect the vaquita. And you don't need to be a Mexican citizen or even a resident to write to her. International pressure is really important, but if you are listening from Mexico, especially if you are a voting citizen, it's even
0:33:33 - (Chris Clarke): more important that you write a letter.
0:33:35 - (Chris Clarke): Again, thank you so much to Serge Levy for his donation and also again 90milesfromneedles.com/donate. We seem to be getting closer to our goal with our Fellowship for Desert Reporting, which you can pitch into at 90milesfromneedles.com/fellowship. We still have a little ways to go to use up all of our matching funds, but there are promising developments there and we may be announcing that we are taking applications for that fellowship before too many more weeks go by.
0:34:05 - (Chris Clarke): In fact, I'm building the application form into our website as we speak. I'm taking Dr. Rojas-Bracho's example and being optimistic there. We have continued declarations of heat emergencies here in the Mojave Desert. We get to the end of one and they extend it by four days. Jack and I have been hiding under the mini split for the last week or so, and I do have certain things I need to do in the outdoors. So does Jack.
0:34:35 - (Chris Clarke): Looking at you, Jack. On my list, cleaning out the garage has become pretty important. But if you're going to work outside, you should do what I'm going to do. Pace yourself, don't overexert. Be lazy. Walk slowly, stay hydrated, bail and go back inside with the AC or the swamp cooler if you can. And maybe save the really strenuous tasks like lifting car engines and pushing boulders up hillsides until October or November.
0:35:12 - (Chris Clarke): One last thing before I go: early on, we did something with this podcast in every episode and I thought it was getting a little old so I stopped it. My friend Kara sent a note at the time saying that she preferred when
0:35:24 - (Chris Clarke): we were doing it, and recently I
0:35:25 - (Chris Clarke): was talking to a listener who said that her son really missed it. And so with that in mind, I'll see you at the next watering hole.
0:35:38 - (Joe Geoffrey): And that brings us to the end of this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. You can find show notes for this episode along with links and background at 90milesfromneedles.com. We're also on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Threads. Just search for 90 Miles from Needles and if you'd like a more direct line, you can reach us on signal at hey90mfn.67.
0:36:13 - (Joe Geoffrey): If you'd like to support the show, you can make a donation of whatever size and frequency feels right to you at 90milesfromneedles.com/donate. Listener support is what makes this podcast possible. Our voiceover is by Joe Geoffrey. Podcast artwork is by Martine Mancham. Nature sounds are recorded by Fred Bell. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio with additional music licensed from independent artists.
0:36:46 - (Chris Clarke): Other music in this episode is by Score Wizards.
0:37:15 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.