Chinese Taste For Fish Bladder Threatens Tiny Porpoise In Mexico
Chinese Taste For Fish Bladder Threatens Tiny Porpoise In Mexico
February 9, 2016·5:15 PM ET
The international trade in exotic animal parts includes rhino horn, seahorses, and bear gall bladders. But perhaps none is as strange as the swim bladder from a giant Mexican fish called the totoaba.
The totoaba can grow to the size of a football player. It lives only in the Gulf of California in Mexico, along with the world's smallest and rarest mammal — a type of porpoise called the vaquita.
Now the new and lucrative bladder trade threatens to wipe out both animals.
"People in Asian cultures use the swim bladder in a soup called fish maw," explains Erin Dean at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. It's also reputed to have some medicinal value — it's thought to boost fertility.
Dean says no one knows why the demand for it has skyrocketed recently. It could be that when a Chinese fish called a yellow croaker, which once supplied bladders, started dying out, people started turning to the Mexican totoaba to meet the demand for bladders.
More:
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/02/09/466185043/chinese-taste-for-fish-bladder-threatens-tiny-porpoise-in-mexico?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=world
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