Updated

Mexico plans to shrink the gillnet-free zone, and the new rules are still unpublished

Since 2020, Mexico’s fishing rules for the Upper Gulf of California have banned gillnets across a large stretch of the vaquita’s range, though only on paper. Officials now say openly that the 2020 rules could never be enforced, and many fishers kept using gillnets regardless.

On 5 and 6 February 2026, federal, state and municipal officials met fishers’ representatives in Mexicali, and an intergovernmental group led by the environment ministry SEMARNAT approved changes to those rules. The new plan would keep a no-fishing Zero Tolerance Area where vaquitas are most often found, guarded by concrete blocks with hooks that snag nets. It would add a “special use area” next to it and a narrow transit channel through it, so boats from San Felipe can reach their fishing grounds more directly. The much larger zone where gillnets are banned would shrink. The Environmental Investigation Agency estimates the cut at more than 85 percent.

The government says smaller zones that it can actually patrol will protect vaquitas better than big ones it can’t. The international recovery team, CIRVA, has some sympathy for that argument, and its scientists agree that enforcement is the problem. In March, though, they warned that the plan leaves out the shallow north-western water where vaquitas, including mothers with calves, were both heard and seen in 2025. They asked for concrete blocks to go in there now, without waiting for some later trigger, since the blocks are the only measure that has clearly worked.

Conservation groups were blunter, with the Environmental Investigation Agency calling the cut “an extinction risk that the vaquita simply cannot afford”. Fishers were divided as well. CIRVA’s report says there was majority support at the Mexicali meeting but no consensus, and by mid-year a San Felipe fishers’ group said nobody was listening to them.

The rules only take effect once they appear in Mexico’s official gazette, the Diario Oficial de la Federación, and as of September that had not happened. In the meantime, the shrimp season opens on 7 October with gillnets still in the water, for the sixth season in a row. We’ll post again when the rules are published.

Sources

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