This Is How Activists Are Working to Save Loreto Bay’s Fish Population
The Sea of Cortez is distinctive for the rich variety of fish — close to 1,000 different species — and marine mammals and other sea creatures that call it home.
Both native and migratory fish inhabit the area’s waters. Just a few types include food and sport fish such as tuna, snapper, and grouper, along with rays, eels, and the vibrantly beautiful angelfish, damselfish, and parrotfish. In fact, about one-tenth of all the fish in these waters are found nowhere else on Earth. For all these reasons, the region has drawn not only tourists and sport fishermen but numerous scientific research organizations interested in long-term projects.
And over the years, environmentalists and eco-activists have worked to help communities like the small town of Loreto, situated on Loreto Bay along the Sea of Cortez in Mexico’s Baja California Sur, achieve sustainable practices that will protect threatened fish and other marine wildlife.
Loreto Coastkeeper — a local organization with a big impact
The Waterkeeper Alliance serves as the world’s largest and most effective organization solely devoted to ensuring the supply of clean, safe water for the benefit of people, wildlife, and ecosystems. Working at the international level, the Waterkeeper Alliance connects a network of 300 similar organizations operating at the local level.
Loreto Coastkeeper, a Waterkeeper Alliance member, has been successful in safeguarding the wildlife refuge of Loreto Bay National Marine Park, launching programs in areas such as land and water use management, and promoting a healthy regulation of fishing. These efforts have made Loreto Bay’s entire ecosystem cleaner and healthier.
Part of the larger Eco-Alianza De Loreto, A.C., Loreto Coastkeeper hopes to continue its work to keep Loreto Bay and its national park, which spans some 800 square miles in and around the Sea of Cortez and its islands, in its current relatively unspoiled state. The region, home to 39 percent of the world’s marine mammal species, is also a noted UNESCO World Heritage site.
Part of the reason behind the Mexican government’s establishment of Loreto Bay National Marine Park in 1996 was to address the problem of over-fishing in the bay. Members of Loreto Coastkeeper, like their counterparts at San Francisco Baykeeper and other local affiliates, conduct regular boat patrols of the bay and its islands. Meanwhile, the government’s parks service handles enforcement of regulations on fishing.
Loreto Coastkeeper, although subject to under-staffing and under-funding, maintains its own lab to test water quality and organize data. This enables it to keep tabs on the locations and timing of discharged pollutants in key spots along the shoreline and pass along vital information to local officials.
This work is paying off in that observers are seeing increasingly larger numbers of both smaller and larger fish. This is also a good sign that recent regulations are successfully addressing the decimations of fish populations that have occurred due to the poorly regulated commercial fishing and sport-fishing industries.
Balancing interests successfully
The thriving fishing industry in and around Loreto Bay has proven itself one of the area’s largest and most prosperous. The commercial shrimping industry alone, for example, has received credit for sustaining tens of thousands of local jobs.
But there is always an environmental trade-off. In the case of Loreto Bay, many of its native fish and other wildlife have been moved perilously nearer to extinction. Additionally, with the build-out and growth of the tourist and sport fishing industries, pollution has increased enough to become a significant source of ecosystem damage.
Thanks in part to Loreto Coastkeeper’s work, sport fishing has decreased over the last 10 years or so, lessening the burden on wildlife populations and the entire marine ecosystem. At the same time, sustainable tourism has increased substantially, with tourists visiting specifically to see the grey whales that winter in Loreto Bay’s waters.
Building a strong community builds a strong ecosystem
Other eco-focused groups work in the Loreto Bay region as well. One is Sociedad de Historia Natural Niparajá, a conservation organization that makes efforts to support the development of sustainable fisheries. Niparajá concentrates on the area along the Loreto-La Paz coastal corridor, where local fishing communities live in relative isolation along some of the region’s most stunning rock-encrusted shorelines.
Through outreach centered on building trust, Niparajá has been able to bring enough of the different fishing communities in the area together to agree to suspend fishing in designated areas for five years. The organization worked to make the advantages of maintaining rich and biodiverse fish populations real to local fishermen. Fishermen who have seen wild fish stocks decrease over the years warmed up to the idea, comparing it to investing in a savings account they could draw from in the future.
Niparajá’s long-range plan also includes chartering research vessels to take scientists, students, and local fishermen on annual trips along the Loreto-La Paz corridor to check on the vitality of fish populations. On these trips, individuals spend time getting to know one another, a vital component of building trust in outside experts among a community that tends to distrust government and officials.
On a recent trip to visit one of the marine reserve areas, one of the fishermen remarked that he was impressed with the variety and numbers of fish, saying that this year’s trip showed him a fish population thriving in a way he had not seen in many years.
