Background: Minimizing fishery bycatch threats might involve trade-offs between maintaining viable populations and economic benefits. Understanding these trade-offs can help managers reconcile conflicting goals. An example is a set of…
From an ecosystem management perspective, analysis of the functional roles of species is a challenge. It is valuable to determine which species are irreplaceable within a given community based on…
Bycatch in artisanal gill nets threatens the vaquita, Phocoena sinus, with extinction. In 2008 the Mexican government announced a conservation action plan for this porpoise, with three options for a…
A line-transect survey for the critically endangered vaquita, Phocoena sinus, was carried out in October–November 2008, in the northern Gulf of California, Mexico. Areas with deeper water were sampled visually…
All extant members of Phocoenidae (porpoises) have been characterized as pedomorphic based on skeletal characters. To investigate the ontogenetic background for pedomorphosis and assess interspecific differences in ontogeny among phocoenids,…
Heterochrony, the change in timing of developmental processes, is thought to be a key process shaping the numerous limb morphologies of tetrapods. Through a delayed offset in digit development, all…
Two scientific efforts brought the need for immediate actions to conserve vaquita as a high priority for the Mexican government. Passive acoustic techniques (Jaramillo-Legorreta, 2008) revealed a negative trend of…
(...) In the autumn of 2008, a large-scale international effort to study the vaquita and develop methods to monitor its population status was conducted. As part of this effort, we…
(...) During April 1997 the acoustic detector was successfully used to detect vaquitas for the first time. On that occasion we surveyed on a fixed location, aboard an outboard motor…
The recent likely extinction of the baiji (Chinese river dolphin [Lipotes vexillifer]) (Turvey et al. 2007) makes the vaquita (Gulf of California porpoise [Phocoena sinus]) the most endangered cetacean. The…