Skip to main content

tv   The Vanishing Vaquita  Al Jazeera  March 1, 2019 10:32pm-11:01pm +03

10:32 pm
didn't donald trump ordered his former chief of staff to ground his son in a top security clearance it back in may the newspaper says john kerry wrote an internal memo confirming the fact off to senior officials in the white house were troubled by the decision krishna's clearance was suspended in two thousand and eighteen and venezuelan opposition leader and self-proclaimed interim president is traveling to argentina for a meeting with president might see a mockery been travelling across south america with trips to brazil and colombia to gain support for a change of government in venezuela meanwhile the united states says it will continue to take appropriate action against venezuelan president nicolas maduro you're up to date with all of our top stories at this hour i will be back with more news for you in about twenty five minutes time to join me then bye for now.
10:33 pm
this is the fact the smallest porpoise on the planet one that could soon be lost forever. with an international team of scientists is determined not to let that happen now it's a race against time to try and save a species without intervention how long do you give the big i would say year to about us to this is the hail mary or the key to. this is technically a show about innovations that can change lives we're going to explore the intersection of hardware and humanity and we're doing it in a unique way this is a show about science by scientists.
10:34 pm
the vet keita is the most endangered marine mammal is a naturally elusive this has never been captured tagged was studied up close by marine biologists. techno is married to davison and chris would take a crisis that's an emergency plan to stave off extinction the gulf of california one of the most beautiful marine sanctuaries in the world it is here in the target gulf waters at the edge of the baja california desert the world's smallest cetacean has found a home now when all the money that one of the earth everybody does yes. america because of the motive. what you have and the wreckage that is found nowhere else right this is the only place that it exists yes exactly this is the only place this is and they make these issues. whether families of ok only we can find it here
10:35 pm
on the place in the war mexico we are so lucky to have these as these are poised belongs in mexico you know if they but get a berth here if you are. given us in a hole so is an acoustic researcher for mexico's government sponsored iraqi to rescue project today to stop when his team plan to deploy several submerged will see pods or underwater listening devices the pods are used to track but keep us his research picked up the early warning signs that indicated the bucky the population was crushing the data is sent to researchers in san diego crystal dilworth has that part of the story tell me what is that the key to and why do you love them so much the cases are especially i think a lovely part because they have a nice paint job they have sort of like black mascara black lipstick heard about a coffee going. few scientists have studied the key to as intended. as barbara
10:36 pm
taylor she heads up in advance genetic laboratory based at the u.s. national oceanic and atmospheric administration in san diego california her main partner there renzo rowe has braccio who heads up the mexican project is equally passionate about saving the key to losing the key to know in a way this just a minute eunice a masterpiece if someone destroys the chick on the or. whatever the world be expecting is that nothing is going to change you're going to wake up in the morning you're going to help of the world is going to be poorer in many many ways and i think that's a situation. i think where enzo and i always thought we could save them you know we knew it was one issue it was throughout was and we thought we could change it yeah and it's. it's a hard thing to to see you know hot it's not happening. so what is
10:37 pm
killing the vicky according to scientists the main culprit is gill nets used to capture and another endangered species found the gulf of california a fish named the twelve cording to the environmental investigation agency demand for to can be traced to china burgess sold illegally and we got a tip off about this. which is also in southern china is on the coast which is said to be a major center for trade in terms of the fish more some chinese believe the dry swim bladder at the to twelve improve skin in liver conditions and figure a circulation and stops bleeding none of this has been proven medically but the illegal trade into twelve is extremely lucrative to twelve a fishing in the gulf is illegal because the same nets used to catch ensnare the keita they have decimated that the key to population. techno is merida davidson was shown how. the pros were
10:38 pm
there i could pick them up but they believe this was in their work for the brewer keeper can you get in time with their hair here or order the order to free him so obviously they're like you they're going to refer to the sort of place and then they get things so they just get stuck here with you when they perish they're going to break. found three adult dead vikki does since we started operation milagro and two new nets pre-born vikki this and i don't actually think it's all of them were neck crops see and the results of the examination show that they all die of a six year and all had leg marks of nets under skiing so they dying because of that's
10:39 pm
a two advantage that is for sure you know leo is captain of the sea shepherd a marine conservation group that voluntarily patrols the upper gulf for twelve minutes five dead rocky to us were found in the gulf from january to may two thousand and seventeen it's a horrific to see how much sea creatures are trapped on those nets it's heartbreaking for this protected marine mammals are dying for no reason they're just died mr to lie about it it's it's horrible. the story of the vaccine is a classic collapse of a species scientists began tracking back in the late one nine hundred ninety s. and we determined twenty years ago that the fishing ban was unsustainable for bakita bay would we predicted that they would be declining about this problem for twenty years. well i mean the people who originally found them found them dead on
10:40 pm
the beach. from fishing nets and said hey here's a porpoise nobody's ever found a porpoise here it can't be very common and it's dying in fishing nets and so yes he's was discovered because it was dying yeah it was found dead on beaches and in fishing dubs you know it's sort of odd that people wouldn't see it but the more you get to know this shy animal the more you understand that you really have to know what you're looking for and you really have to look for them to see them because they avoid any motorised vessel and they're really small they're only in groups of one or two so they're really difficult to see they are like the flashy dolphins and come up and ride your bow and you know you get to see every aspect of their lives the porpoises are very shy they move away and so you really have to look for them with like really big binoculars with bucky just on the brink of extinction the team made a decision that was as bold as it was all day shoots in order to save the bucky the
10:41 pm
remaining population now numbering less than thirty would have to be taken into captivity the plan was implemented in november two thousand and sixteen at the eighth meeting of sort of an international committee to save the bucky the only option is separate. from the main respect were voted skilling. for twelve agreements at this point in time and also i mean there are of knowns but what we really know is that if we don't take them out they wouldn't get so this is the lesser of two evils you know so it's black or white techno was given preliminary plans that spell out how to capture the elusive but keep us and bring them to the northernmost cove in the gulf where they would be held in sea pens and kept under guard twenty four hours a day seven days a week there are also plans for land based tanks systems and support apparatus. keep the captured porpoises alive in case of emergency where we've brought in this
10:42 pm
amazing team we're going to have about forty people from all over the world all with different levels of expertise and we have specialists and capturing harbor porpoises from denmark and the netherlands we have veterinarians that have worked with porpoises from hong kong to to the netherlands we have people who have specialized in taking capturing so we have that that team that we have the team of people who i work with that are experts in finding them will be using both acoustics and visual and we're even going to be bringing in maybe dolphins to help us try to track this really elusive species the u.s. navy's marine mammal program utilizes bottlenose dolphins to locate underwater sea mines little is known about the vacuum no one has ever tagged them or been able to study them up close the problem of how to capture them and large but during
10:43 pm
a scientific team meeting a breakthrough from a scientist who works with the navy program in here that you can ever think of using maybe don't fence miller and i mean that's completely out of my. what he told books and she said well you know if they can find diverse and objects in the water i'm sure they could find what you. next day we went to them maybe facilities for years they trained the dolphins they took them to the golden gate in san francisco where they have harbor porpoises swimming in the dolphins were able to find it so when we sold that part who seem to be the most difficult one for you well. here we are. i'm floating in the middle of the bucky the refuge area here in the gulf of california now this refuge was set up by the mexican government to protect the vacuum the populations are what's left of them they've set up here because over the past several years through observation and through acoustic recordings this is
10:44 pm
where the rocky does really tend to hang out at least recently we've been out here for a while trying to see if we can find any wreckage that's no surprise to me that we haven't seen any and that really underscores how difficult and complex this mission is really going to be stuff as data analysis indicates the remaining bucky the population may be concentrating across three sections in the upper part of the gulf today's sea pod drop we'll try to confirm those locations so we've just arrived at one of the points where they're going to drop down a moring and attach to that is going to be potus so it's the acoustic measuring device that they leave for four months here to measure and and pick up the sounds of the vacuum clicks so that's what we've done we've we've navigated here via via g.p.s. it's a really vast area and they've set up at the kitchen please eighty seven they're going to put out eighty seven of the c. pods right now we're putting up the last eight. later
10:45 pm
back on shore double showed us a computer program that allows us to hear the bucky humans can hear the clicks because they're too high frequency but there's a way for you to modify them so that we actually could have me listen to this of course like a walk around my. base in one in five. and. wow for. the bucket the refuge measures in area sixty four by nearly one hundred kilometers along the upper third of the gulf of california when you are in it the refuge seems vast and problematic to police effectively. since two thousand and five gill net fishing has been banned here but the real story is much different especially at night it is pretty dramatic and crazy every night it's so busy it
10:46 pm
never stops we have radars on our bridge of the time time when and if. and under us radars we can see the new activity at nights because poachers really go out at night the night of march eleventh two thousand and seventeen was busier than most of the sea shepards farley mowat here on patrol for poachers spotted a small fishing boat in the back of the refuge. and when we see a target of a piece we get our ship as close as possible and then the drone team is going to be ready to drop the drone was able to film is illegal fishermen with what appeared to be a boat load of took twelve of the fishermen noticed the trone and began hurling objects at it then we get the fourth age old. fisherman retreating to two odd minutes getting to a two hour bus i call the authorities tell them to position. them what
10:47 pm
we're seeing at the same time and and then they calm and they tried to arrest them the next day the ship caught another seemingly bolder group fishing in broad daylight this was the first time the drone was able to capture full daylight images of a boatload of coached and. can the big problem is money just like always. illegal fishing activity for to i about brings out a lot of money because china is opening the black market that is attracting a lot of organized crime says the two of us in batteries for more than twenty thousand dollars a kilo of course when you come to those fishing villages where the minimum wage is so low and they can make our five thousand dollars a kilo locally with a with one kill swim bladder the mexican government has invested so far
10:48 pm
over a billion pixels in compensating fishermen and from children go forward it isn't a scientist but he co-chairs the baccy the rescue program in mexico he created a plan to use economic incentives to keep your nets out of the gulf for the past two years mexico has paid fishermen not to fish into alternative gear that don't kill the kita could be developed you can imagine going through the communities. trying to convince families not to go back and fish which is what they have been doing for generations that's who they are right as part of their identity i would say and that's the whole purpose of these programs to have them go back and fish but being able to do so without arguing but you know. it's important for mexico to save the the from extinction and i would do it's if we went to the same efforts as china has been doing to save panda mexico's efforts have seen mixed results
10:49 pm
progress has been made but the numbers don't lie the baccy is almost gone there recently that we are where we are it's because our fish you know ferry does have failed to come with alternative fishing gear for two decades i mean that's incredible they haven't. been able to do it even if i had twenty years ago if i had hired mit or who would have already something but the pressure is barman has a monopole and bury the only one tests alternative here so with that's horrible. it is early morning in ensign on the mexican techno has been invited to travel out to the pacific ocean to see where the bucket the rescue plan is truly taking shape these pens belong to bottle farms a mexican tuna farming company the back east a rescue team turned to them for help where where would the natural get these big.
10:50 pm
big then you're losing the back you know so we are aware of that we are delighted to be part of or. is the operations manager of. a sea pen designed to give tourists an up close view of the tuna farming business this plan is currently located off the coast of ensign out of mexico on the pacific side of baja california and contains hundreds of bluefin tuna but before long it will be moved to the gulf of california and if all goes well with a bucket the rescue effort instead of china there will be by keep us swimming within it be bunko provided renderings of the redesigned bucket the pen which feature two observation tubs this tourist attraction will become a floating laboratory. you know we're looking at the tuna in the observation area it struck me that they're feeding very close to the surface and that's not normally how they feed right. so they've had to learn
10:51 pm
a new way of feeding and that will essentially be the case for them i keep them i suppose so. as far as i know they were eating the same thing that the dolphins to of the open ocean and i mean the. small fish and sweet things play out there for when those kind of organisms of the ocean differently they recognize you and is going to learn how to eat the rocky the pen will be taken here to the northernmost end of the gulf in an area called much shore a cove gustava showed us the area during our gulf tour the blue building i'm sure is an old trim processing plant that will be converted to an on site veterinary care center so you think that's the best shot absolutely it's not only the best shot but it's the only shot that we have we're going to have facilities in the ocean and we're going to have some oh so limited land and we're also looking to one
10:52 pm
of the. most important pieces of these projects is to have a facility right in the heart of the book. area where we can have vets where we can have twenty four seven care for but keep those there we could be monitoring them we can learn a little bit more bold but there is a little opposition to the rescue plan within the scientific community the conservation groups led by the sea shepherd society believes the problem should be solved without captivity. has always been fighting against captive of its own for me it's not a solution and first ship is not a solution because saving on anymore is not having it in a swimming pool and it should be free and leaving its life and contributing to. eco system kind of a maybe it's not working right now in plan b. those two means known to man. there were many questions surrounding the capture
10:53 pm
program but if scientists are successful the next step in the process will be to try and breed that the key to scientists in san diego are getting ready these will be the ancestors of all the cute and into the future this breeding program so we need to make sure that we know what we've got and keep that variation that natural genetic variation in that population into the future phillip more in works with the to key to rescue team in san diego his research molecular geneticist is that the key to can be successfully bred in captivity he will have to figure out how to make the genetics work so that they keep us special because it lacks this genetic diversity that other species do how is it managed to survive for so long so what we believe happens in a population like species like the key to is that they've been in a small population size for a long time so that bad person has slowly been purged from the species so that
10:54 pm
means they have less of the bad diversity they also have less of the good diversity . but in a stable environment like the northern gulf of california they've managed to survive and there is still diversity is not to say they have none because of this lack of diversity in the vicky is it possible to accidentally do harm to the species through the breeding programs that you're developing. yes yeah i mean there is no way to avoid that we're going to lose diversity. there's no way to avoid that because we're collapsing the population from thousands down to a few and then they're going to have to breed to some extent with the same individuals in order to build that population up. more and has been studying the key to using tissue samples stored in the deep freeze at the san diego fisheries science center it's cold in here minus twenty degrees celsius and besides myself in this open here there's about two hundred thousand tissue samples from
10:55 pm
a variety of marion's forty five of those samples are from the clutha and that's the hope that those samples contain some still current and i think information that can help save that species and how long the samples look at this temperature for these samples are about thirty years old now and we're still extracting d.n.a. from them. so we're hoping they're going to last a long time so it's like science evolves just the right time to be able to help the big key to right before it they go extinct the ability to culture cells and transform them is changing right now so that if we get living cells from the skins of of these the ketones are brought into captivity we can keep them alive in the lab we can transform them into any types of cells we want so even if we catch an animal. that may be too old to reproduce or only reproduce is once the fort it can't reproduce a more if we have those cells it's possible we can convert those into damn eats into sperm and egg cells in the future and use them put them back in the population
10:56 pm
as if that and the most alive. advanced genetics may end up being the game changer for that the key to san diego's frozen c two has played a key role in trying to save many nearly extinct species a porpoise and a right nasir might not seem to have that much in common but scientists here at the frozen zoo at san diego zoo global are working to save the noise. they're in white right now and techniques they developed could act as a blueprint to save that the key to we are pretty confident that if we get a good quality sample will be able to grow and successfully freeze the cells that's going to tell us more about the vicki to it's going to say something about its population history it will provide may be. very useful information about whether there's enough genetic diversity in the remaining population to allow it to recover and expand. all of
10:57 pm
a writer is director of the frozen zoo it holds more than ten thousand living cell cultures if nothing else works the frozen samples would become a last resort for an extinct species the vicky is such an endgame at the end of the day all we may have are cells and we mustn't though. ignore that. were engaging in. an enterprise that we don't know. time is running out for the science maybe its last hope but it comes with the price tag the rescue effort is expected to cost five million u.s. dollars the u.s. national marine mammal foundation says it has four point five million on hand three minute and will come from the mexican government the rest from private dynas many of the scientists donating that tiny hole to give the key to
10:58 pm
a fighting chance for tech i'm sure the same araa. with a new leader in brazil comes changes to how it deals with in the u.s. brazil's vice president is playing an active role of president asked you not to
10:59 pm
talk to the press but you're still talking the president just told me to be careful the vice president of brazil talks to al-jazeera. john presence on donald trump journey or was promised a damaging information about hillary clinton allegation like to see andrea investigation stick the troops did the trump campaign with russia did you at any time birch the former f.b.i. director james comey in any way shape or form the closer to back down the
11:00 pm
investigation into michael flynn and also as you well know. next question battlefield washington on al-jazeera. hello i'm maryam namazie in london just a quick look at the top stories for you now pakistan returned a captured pilot to india on friday in a move many people hope will deescalate tensions between the two countries but shelling does continue between the two sides and those living in the disputed region of kashmir say they are the one's course in the crossfire says jamil reports from new delhi. at the walk a border crossing in punjab wing commander of the london birth mom is released from baucus twenty custody back to india two days after the aircraft was shot down.

118 Views

info Stream Only

Uploaded by TV Archive on