Phocoena sinus · vaquita · “little cow”

The world’s most endangered marine mammal always looks like it’s smiling.

Dark rings circle its eyes and its lips curve up at the corners, but the vaquita has little to smile about. The world’s smallest porpoise lives only in one corner of Mexico’s Gulf of California, where fishing nets have drowned so many that the 2025 survey saw only seven to ten.

The species

The vaquita is the smallest porpoise alive and one of the smallest cetaceans (whales, porpoises, dolphins) of any kind. A full-grown female is up to about 1.5 metres long, roughly the height of a 12-year-old, and weighs about as much as a large dog (somewhere between a Labrador and a Great Dane, or 30 to 55 kilograms).

Plenty of porpoises have striking markings (the spectacled porpoise is a good example), but the vaquita’s face is its own. Dark patches ring its eyes like an eyepatch, and a dark line runs along its lips, which gives it a face you won’t mix up with any other.

They are shy, they surface briefly and quietly, and they have never been kept alive in captivity. There are photos of living vaquitas, but they’re taken from a distance as the animals briefly surface, and most close-ups are of stranded, dead animals. Nobody has the sharp photos or video that exist for, say, killer whales. The illustrations on this page are drawn from the few good pictures there are.

7–10

different vaquitas seen during the 2025 survey, including at least one calf. This is a count of the animals observers saw in a small search area, so it is not a population estimate. The whole range was last surveyed in 2015, and the last estimate of the total population was for 2018.

CONANP · 2025 survey
reviewed 5 October 2026 · source: CONANP · 2025 survey (opens in a new tab)

The vaquita’s home is tiny

The vaquita has never been recorded anywhere but the northern end of the Gulf of California. Since 2017, most of the ones anyone has seen or heard were in one small patch of that water, and recent surveys keep finding a few just outside it.

1 of 5 · The eastern Pacific

The vaquita lives in a very small part of a very large ocean.

This view covers about a quarter of the planet. The vaquita is found in one corner of it and nowhere else.
2 of 5 · The Gulf of California

The Gulf of California runs about 1,200 kilometres between Baja California and mainland Mexico.

Whales, dolphins and sea lions live along its length. The vaquita lives only at its northern end.
3 of 5 · The historical range

Every vaquita ever recorded has lived inside this area.

NOAA maps the historical range at about 8,408 km², from the 2022 IUCN assessment, which is roughly the size of Puerto Rico. The dots are records from Mexico’s national biodiversity database, dated 1960 to 2008 where a date is given. They show where vaquitas were found then, not where they are now.
4 of 5 · The protected areas

Mexico has drawn three boundaries through this water.

The long dashed outline is the area where gillnets are banned. Inside it is the Vaquita Refuge, 1,841 km² since its 2018 enlargement and about the size of Greater London. The fine dotted line is the biosphere reserve, shown for context rather than as a vaquita boundary.
5 of 5 · The Zero Tolerance Area

Enforcement is strictest inside this 225 km² box.

Mexico decreed it in 2020, and most vaquita detections since 2017 have come from inside it. The thin dashed lines are replacement boundaries drafted in 2026 and not yet enacted. Recent surveys have also found vaquitas outside the box, and in September 2025 CONANP heard them as far out as the refuge boundary.

Making sense of the numbers

Most detections come from a tiny sliver of the Gulf

The Gulf of California covers somewhere between 160,000 km² and 177,000 km² of water, depending on the source. Most detections since 2017 fall inside 225 km² of it, which is less than a sixth of one percent.
The water the vaquita relies on most is a short stretch of sea

The Zero Tolerance Area is a tilted box about 22 km along its top edge and 10 km down its side. Were it road instead of sea, you could drive the length of it before your coffee went cold.
The vaquita’s world gets smaller at every step

The vaquita’s whole known range, 8,408 km², is about the size of Puerto Rico. The refuge inside it, 1,841 km², is a little larger than Greater London. The area where most of them are still heard, 225 km², is less than half the size of Lake Tahoe.

The same facts, without the map

The vaquita is found only in the northern end of the Gulf of California, Mexico. It has never been recorded anywhere else.
NOAA’s historical-range polygon, referenced to the 2022 IUCN assessment, covers about 8,408 km². NOAA’s prose estimate is smaller again, at roughly 3,934 km² east of San Felipe. They are different products and should not be added together.
Three enacted Mexican boundaries overlap that water: the Vaquita Refuge Area (1,841 km², DOF 2018), the Zero Tolerance Area (225 km², DOF 2020) and the much larger gillnet-prohibition area (2020). “Exclusion area” on its own does not identify any one of them.
The IUCN’s 2022 Red List assessment found that nearly all detections since 2018 had been inside the Zero Tolerance Area. Surveys since then have found vaquitas outside it. Half the 2024 sightings were in the area just beyond its edge, and in 2025 a fifth of the sightings were outside the area the concrete blocks protect, with acoustic detections (93 encounters at 24 of 66 sites in September) reaching the edge of the Vaquita Refuge.
A replacement gillnet exclusion area, special use area and transit channel were drafted in 2026. As of 29 July 2026 no DOF publication had enacted them.
The dots on the map are CONABIO/SNIB occurrence records: 430 exported records at 256 distinct locations. The 322 that carry a date run from 1960 to 2008. They are historical collection and observation records, so they show neither living animals nor a habitat boundary.
The nearest ports are San Felipe, Golfo de Santa Clara and Puerto Peñasco.

The threat

One thing kills vaquitas: gillnets. A gillnet is a wall of fine mesh hung in the water column, invisible to a porpoise using echolocation the way a pane of glass is invisible to a bird. They swim into it, they cannot surface, and they drown.

Most of the nets in the vaquita’s range are set illegally for totoaba, a large fish whose dried swim bladder sells for extraordinary sums in an overseas market. Nobody has ever fished for the vaquita itself, and every one caught in a net is bycatch.

The cause is a trafficking market and enforcement that has not held. The fishing communities of the Upper Gulf have lived with a shrinking legal livelihood and a violent illegal trade operating alongside it.

Illustration of a vaquita rising towards the surface with a trail of bubbles

1 cause of death that matters — entanglement in gillnets IUCN SSC CSG
2015 the last year anyone surveyed the whole range IUCN SSC CSG
7–10 vaquitas seen on the 2025 survey, including at least one calf. A minimum count from a small search area. CONANP · 2025

The timeline

It took thirty-four million years of toothed whales branching apart to arrive at this animal. People have known it exists for seventy-six of those years, and in that time it went from a skull on a beach to the seven to ten animals the 2025 survey managed to see.

The story has two halves that move at very different speeds. Every card carries the study or the law it came from.

~2.4m years the vaquita has been its own species (somewhere between 1.7 and 3.2 million) Ben Chehida et al. 2020
76 years since the first vaquita was found, in 1950
98% fewer vaquitas in 2018 than in 1997. Whole-population estimates fell from about 567 to about 9 in 21 years. Jaramillo-Legorreta et al. 1999 · 2019

Act one · deep time

The vaquita has been a small population for about 300,000 years.

Each mark is a branching point in the family tree, dated from DNA and fossils.

What’s the shaded part?

The shaded stretch is the last 150 years. To fit 34 million years on one line, this scale is squeezed, so the further left you go, the more time each step covers. On an even scale, those 150 years would be thinner than a hair. Act two, below, zooms into them.

Act two · since we met it

It took us less than one lifetime to bring it to the edge of extinction.

Most actions were only taken after the collapse of the population.

What the marks mean

Whole-population estimate
Minimum individuals seen — a different measurement
Law or protected area
Status change or alert
Science and surveys

5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 0 ≈5,000 before the nets 567 9

1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 2026

Population estimate · Animals identified in surveys (not comparable)

Can the vaquita recover, and how long would it take?

Suppose every gillnet came out of the Gulf of California tomorrow. The vaquita could recover, but vaquitas have very few young, so getting their numbers back would take somewhere between 70 and 100 years, and that clock only starts once the nets are gone.

How long it could take

Vaquitas have very few young. A female can first breed somewhere between three and six years old and has one calf at a time, and scientists aren’t sure whether she rests a year between calves or has one every year. That one unknown changes the answer by decades, so here are both.

How long until there are as many vaquitas as in 1997 (567), starting from about ten today

If mothers rest a year between calves (what scientists have long thought) about 100 years · around 2130
If mothers have a calf every year (the most hopeful case) about 70 years · around 2095

Either way it’s somewhere between seven and ten vaquita generations. A child born this year would be about 70, or over 100, before the vaquita was back to where it was in 1997.

What these estimates assume

Every gillnet is gone this year, and no more vaquitas die in them.
We start from about ten vaquitas, the top of the likely range from the 2025 survey.
The population grows at the best-case rate scientists have published for vaquitas, every single year.
Vaquitas still find each other to breed, even when there are very few of them.
Nothing else goes wrong, like a heatwave, a disease or a year when food runs short.

Why the real answer is probably slower

Real life is messier than any estimate, and some of those things will go wrong. So treat these as the fastest the vaquita could come back. The Gulf will need protecting for decades after the first signs of recovery.

Can ten be enough?

Their genes are in better shape than you’d expect

When a species is down to a handful of animals, the usual worry is inbreeding. Closely related parents pass on hidden genetic faults, and calves don’t survive. Vaquitas have always been rare, though, and over tens of thousands of years most of those faults were weeded out. When scientists read the genomes of twenty vaquitas, they found very little hidden damage.

They then used those genomes to simulate the next fifty years many times over. If no more vaquitas die in nets, the vaquita survives in 94 of every 100 runs. If nets keep killing them, even at a fifth of the rate of recent years, the vaquita is more likely to disappear than survive.

Good genes don’t protect against everything. Heatwaves, food running short and a changing sea aren’t part of these models, and nobody has measured how they would affect the vaquita.

94 in 100 simulated futures where the vaquita is still here after fifty years, if no more die in nets Robinson et al. 2022 · Science

Frozen cells can’t bring them back

In 2017, scientists grew living cells from two female vaquitas and froze them at the Frozen Zoo in San Diego. Those cells are valuable for research, and they’re a big part of why we know so much about vaquita genetics.

They can’t replace the animals, though. Cloning a vaquita would need egg cells and a surrogate mother from a closely related species, no whale, dolphin or porpoise has ever been cloned, and no vaquita has ever survived in human care. Cells from two animals couldn’t rebuild a population anyway.

San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance · Frozen Zoo, 2018

None of this recovery can begin while gillnets are still in the water, so every year they stay adds another year to the wait.

Where these numbers come from

The growth rates are the published best cases: about 4% a year if mothers rest a year between calves, and roughly 6% if they have a calf every year (Jaramillo-Legorreta et al. 2019). A vaquita generation is about 10 years (IUCN 2022), and the breeding ages and calving intervals come from Hohn et al. 1996 and Taylor et al. 2019.

The estimates assume that best-case growth every single year, starting from ten animals: about 103 years to reach 567 at 4%, and about 69 at 6%. They are rounded to about 100 and about 70 because nobody can predict a population this precisely.

Hohn et al. 1996 · Journal of Zoology 239
Jaramillo-Legorreta et al. 1999 · Marine Mammal Science 15
Gerrodette & Rojas-Bracho 2011 · Marine Mammal Science 27
Jaramillo-Legorreta et al. 2019 · Royal Society Open Science 6
Robinson et al. 2022 · Science 376
Kyriazis et al. 2023 · Heredity 130
Taylor et al. 2019 · Marine Mammal Science 35
Rojas-Bracho, Taylor & Jaramillo-Legorreta 2022 · IUCN Red List

What’s being done to save the vaquita?

Mexico and scientists from around the world have been working to protect the vaquita for more than thirty years. Some of that work is now clearly helping the animals that are left, and some of it never stopped the nets.

Latest · 30 July 2026 Mexico’s new fishing rules are still a draft, and they leave a gap.

CIRVA, the international scientific committee that advises Mexico on saving the vaquita, says the draft leaves a stretch of shallow water to the north-west without concrete-block protection, even though vaquitas were seen and heard there in 2025.

What’s working

409 concrete blocks snag nets where the vaquitas live.

Mexico’s Navy has laid 409 hooked concrete blocks on the seabed where the last vaquitas live, 193 in 2022 and 216 more in 2024, and they catch any gillnet set there. CIRVA says the blocks are the only measure so far proven to protect vaquitas.
More than 90% fewer boats fish in the core area.

Fishers now mostly keep out of the Zero Tolerance Area, the 225 km² no-fishing zone set up in 2020. Sea Shepherd’s radar counted over 90% fewer boats there in each fishing season from 2023 to 2025, compared with before the blocks went in, with joint Navy patrols helping.
The vaquitas there look healthy, and they’re still having calves.

Surveys keep finding young vaquitas. In 2025, drone footage showed adults and young in good condition and feeding undisturbed, and a female the team calls Frida, known by her bent dorsal fin, had her second calf since 2023.
Underwater microphones hear vaquitas nobody can see.

Underwater detectors pick up vaquitas’ clicks when nobody can see them. They tracked the decline from 2011, and in 2024 and 2025 they showed vaquitas using water north-west of the protected core, which is why CIRVA wants that area protected too.

What hasn’t worked

Gillnet bans on paper didn’t keep the nets out of the water.

Mexico banned gillnets across the northern Gulf, for two years in 2015 and permanently in 2017, and the vaquita kept declining. Mexican officials told CIRVA in 2026 that the 2020 rules had been impossible to enforce, and on some days that January radar still picked up more than 40 boats possibly net fishing in the refuge.
The switch to safer fishing gear is still unfinished.

Since 2008, Mexico has offered fishers compensation and gear that doesn’t trap porpoises. According to NOAA this may have slowed the decline without stopping it, and CIRVA still lists the move to vaquita-safe gear as unfinished work.
Catching vaquitas to protect them ended when one died.

In 2017 an international team, VaquitaCPR, tried to move vaquitas into human care until the nets were gone. The first animal caught was so stressed she was released within hours, the second, an adult female, died, and captures will not be tried again.
Money from smuggled totoaba keeps the nets coming back.

The nets are set for totoaba, a large fish whose dried swim bladder is smuggled to China. NOAA reports a kilogram can pay a fisher about half a year’s legal income, and illegal fishing has carried on since Mexico closed the fishery in 1975.

What you can do

Become a vaquita supporter

You’ll hear what’s happening in the Gulf, and we’ll tell you when there’s a petition to sign or a letter to send.

News from the Gulf, when there’s something worth telling you
A heads-up when there’s a petition to sign or a letter to send
The dates of the next Save The Vaquita Week

Stream for the vaquita

Give an hour of your channel during Save The Vaquita Week. Channels of any size and any kind of content are welcome.

Registration is closed for this year.

Donate

Your donation goes to the Porpoise Conservation Society (Porpoise.org), one of the members of ¡VIVA Vaquita!, a coalition of non-profit organizations from around the world working together to save the vaquita.

Tell one person

Send this page to someone who hasn’t heard of the vaquita.

The world’s most endangered marine mammal always looks like it’s smiling.

The species

The vaquita’s home is tiny

The vaquita lives in a very small part of a very large ocean.

The Gulf of California runs about 1,200 kilometres between Baja California and mainland Mexico.

Every vaquita ever recorded has lived inside this area.

Mexico has drawn three boundaries through this water.

Enforcement is strictest inside this 225 km² box.

Making sense of the numbers

Most detections come from a tiny sliver of the Gulf

The water the vaquita relies on most is a short stretch of sea

The vaquita’s world gets smaller at every step

The threat

The timeline

The vaquita has been a small population for about 300,000 years.

Toothed whales begin to diversify

Dolphins and porpoises part company

The porpoise family begins

The seven living porpoises trace back to this point

The vaquita branch splits off

Cut off in the Gulf of California

Homo sapiens appears, at almost the same moment

Around 2,800 breeding animals

A skull on a beach near San Felipe

It took us less than one lifetime to bring it to the edge of extinction.

About 5,000 vaquitas

A skull on the shore of Punta San Felipe

Phocoena sinus enters the record

The first mention of bycatch

Mexico closes the totoaba fishery

Highest international trade protection

Listed under the US Endangered Species Act

First IUCN assessment

Upper Gulf biosphere reserve

One step from extinct in the wild

567 vaquitas — the first real count

Mexico and the US count the whole range

A refuge in the western Upper Gulf

245 left

About 100 — and this is the last full survey

Two years, no gillnets

About 30

The ban is made permanent

VaquitaCPR stops after a death

Nine

7 to 15 individuals seen

A no-fishing core, in law

5 to 13 individuals seen

193 hooked blocks on the seabed

8 to 13 individuals seen

The IWC issues its first Extinction Alert

6 to 8 individuals seen

7 to 10 individuals seen

The next set of protections is not law yet