Critically Endangered
Vaquita
Phocoena sinus
The Vaquita is a porpoise that lives only in the northern end of the Gulf of California in Baja California, Mexico.
Appearance
The body is small, with an unusually tall triangular dorsal fin, a rounded head, and no distinguished beak. The back is darker grey; the belly is white. Dorsal fin height is greater in males than in females.
The smallest living species of cetacean, the Vaquita can be easily distinguished from any other species in its range.
Females reach about 150 cm (4.9 ft), and males about 140 cm (4.6 ft).
Range and habitat
Vaquita habitat is limited to a sliver of the upper Gulf of California (also called the Sea of Cortez), the tightest range of any cetacean. The Vaquita is a porpoise that lives only in the northern end of the Gulf of California in Baja California, Mexico.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
They eat a mix of demersal fish species, crustaceans, and squids, mostly bottom fish such as grunts and croakers.
In crisis
The species is on the brink of extinction. Numbers collapsed mainly because of drowning in gillnets set for illegal totoaba. Populations that experience a sudden decline in numbers are often more vulnerable to other threats in the future due to a bottleneck of genetic diversity within the reduced population. The first full Vaquita survey across the range was done in 1997 and put the population at 567 individuals.
A count as of 2018 put the number under 19 individuals. With nets still in the water and so few adults left, counts put the living population under 10 vaquitas alive as of February 2022.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Vaquita is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Vaquita, Wikidata item Q725493. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
