Blog from the Sea of Cortez: Agua Verde

It's no secret that the Gulf of California has been severely overfished since the days when Jacques Yves Cousteau called it the "Aquarium of the World." For example, see this report from the Rocky Reef Ecological Monitoring Program of the Gulf of California about changes over the last 25 years. 

TL;DR? It's bad.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for hope. Under pressure from local NGOs and, later, Mexican fishermen and women, the Mexican government has set up a series of small refugios in the Gulf of California. Two of them are around Agua Verde, a small, isolated town located about 100 nm north of La Paz. The refugios alone would be worthless without some kind of monitoring program, which the local communities have established. Many of their youth have been trained in SCUBA diving and monitoring protocols so that they can do regular surveys of the sites.

The results have been encouraging, albeit uneven.

An important goal of the Western Flyer Foundation is community-driven science. That is, we are looking to be a resource for communities up and down the Pacific coast that have their own science questions. Saturday was a great example.

The local fishing community wanted to use our ROV to take a look at four nearby refugio sites. It was not without its challenges. The currents in the area are very strong. Once you put the ROV over the side, you're stuck: you can't really move the boat very far or very fast, so you have to anticipate which way Flyer is going to drift and get upstream from the target area, hoping you'll drift over it. There also tend to be a lot of rocks in the area, making it easy to snag the tether to the ROV.

Plus, the ROV was handicapped: one of its thrusters was frozen, making it difficult to turn left. Our marine tech, Jenni, did a magnificent job driving the device, despite these problems.

The two morning sites were not very impressive. It wasn't clear whether there just wasn't much going on, or we were at the wrong spot. Language barriers didn't help.

By the afternoon, we had gotten better at positioning the boat and communicating with the fishermen about where they wanted to be. The results at our third site, La Brecha, were spectacular. Clearly, it was doing fine.

Self-portrait in the ROV.

Hard earned lunch in an Agua Verde restaurant.

A little help with the driving?

The local fishermen got excited when a
school of Red Snapper swam into view.

Video from our ROV at La Brecha.
The irridenscent red fish is Red Snapper, a popular game fish.