The Mexican Totoaba is threatened with extinction, although there's now aquaculture starting up, but it's overfishing seems to spell doom for the world's smallest cetacean, vaquita.
The international trade in exotic animal parts includes rhino horn, seahorses and bear gallbladders. But perhaps none is as strange as the swim bladder from a giant Mexican fish called the totoaba. The totoaba can grow to the size of a football player. It lives only in the Gulf of California in Mexico, along with the world's rarest marine mammal — an endangered porpoise called the vaquita. Now the new and lucrative bladder trade threatens to wipe out both animals.
The international trade in exotic animal parts includes rhino horn, seahorses and bear gallbladders. But perhaps none is as strange as the swim bladder from a giant Mexican fish called the totoaba. The totoaba can grow to the size of a football player. It lives only in the Gulf of California in Mexico, along with the world's rarest marine mammal — an endangered porpoise called the vaquita. Now the new and lucrative bladder trade threatens to wipe out both animals.
