Vaquitas Research Paper

Words: 516
Pages: 3

Have you ever heard of a vaquita, I bet you haven’t. If you did I bet you didn’t know that they receive sound from their throats. Vaquitas are very interesting from what the look like to where they come from and even why the are going extinct.
Vaquitas have very interesting features. Let's start with their length, A female on average is 55.4 inches and a male on average is 53.6 inches, they weigh about 90-120 pounds when fully grown. Baby vaquitas are usually between 28-31 inches at birth and weigh about 17 pounds. Now with what the look like, they have dark rings that surround their eyes and patches around their lips. Its color on the fins and top part of the body is gray, the sides are pale gray and under its belly is white with gray markings. They can live up to 22 years old and are the smallest member of the porpoise family. They eat ocean fish such as the Gulf croaker, bronzes striped grunts and sometimes the eat squid. To get a better picture in your mind vaquitas look very dolphin like.
Vaquitas are located in the Gulf of California, Mexico and they maybe located in the Colorado River Delta. They are only about a 4 hour drive from San Diego They have never
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Sadly there predators (Large sharks and killer whales) are not the cause of them going extinct. The cause is the fishermen's gill nets. A gill-net is a wall of netting that are almost invisibly to catch fish. Vaquitas are getting stuck and are struggling getting free. The reason they are getting stuck is because their gills get entangled. The decline rate has been accelerating quite a bit, in recent years they have declined by 18.5% annually. It's a very big possibility that the vaquita will be extinct in as little at 2 years. Some kinds of extinction are because the animals has no place to live but vaquitas have a nice place to live. If we would just stop using our gill-nets to fish the vaquitas will be able to