The last vaquita: Saving an endangered porpoise from extinction

The world’s smallest, most-endangered porpoise finds itself tangled in gillnets and black-market Chinese medicine, but the Mexican Navy and the U.S. Navy’s trained dolphins are trying to come to its rescue.

Austin Allen is a Ph.D. student in marine science and conservation at Duke University, focusing on measuring the impacts of human activities on marine mammals. He wrote this op-ed as an exercise in his “Communications for Scientists” class – a core course in Science & Society’s Science Communication Program.

Read more at the San Diego Union-Tribune