PROGRESO, Mexico — Ricardo Domínguez Cano stared out at the deep blue sea off the Yucatán Peninsula as he recalled a different time, before a vital marine animal was in peril.
“Sea cucumber was not something special, until prices started to go up a lot,” Cano, 47, told Noticias Telemundo. “Then many people came from other [Mexican] United States and settled in Yucatan for cucumber. And they continued to fish, despite the ban.”
“The sea cucumber could be finished,” the third-generation fisherman said sadly.
Local fishermen, conservationists, and scientists and academics are sounding the alarm about the decline in the number of these marine animals known for “cleaning the bottom of the sea,” according to Cuauhtémoc Ruiz Pineda, a researcher at the National Fisheries Institute (Inapesca), who is responsible for monitoring these animals.
But there is a demand for them, especially in Asia. Due to intense overfishing, sea cucumber populations declined so much in the Yucatan that Mexico prohibited to fish them in 2013.
The number of sea cucumbers have not yet recovered enough to allow the resumption of fishing activities, but it is still being done: according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in 2020 almost 1,600 tons of sea cucumber were fished in Mexico.
According to data from the Government of Mexico, 100% of sea cucumbers are exported, mainly to the Asian market —Hong Kong and other Chinese cities— and secondly to the US.
The Center for Biological Diversity has denounced that the importation of sea cucumber to the US has increased a 36 times in the last decade, and required that is protected by the Endangered Species Act.
The FAO estimated that more than 215,000 Tons of sea cucumbers were caught between 2013 and 2017 around the world. Of that figure, around 7,800 tons were caught in Mexico.
As with other species in danger of extinction, such as the totoaba in Mexico, the main reason for the indiscriminate fishing of cucumbers is economic. Larger and better-processed specimens fetch high prices on the Asian market: a kilo can fetch $600 to $3,500 or more in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities.
Around the world, an appetite for it
Sea cucumbers are invertebrate animals that live on rocks, seagrasses, or algae at the bottom of the sea. Soft and viscous to the touch, they fulfill an important environmental function: they eat all the organic debris found in the sand and leave it clean, allowing the coexistence of various species and recycling, remineralizing and oxygenating the seabed.
“Without the sea cucumber, the bottom of the ocean changes,” said Ruiz Pineda.
In the sea cucumber trade, the main product is its dried body wall, which is reconstituted by simmering and consumed in sauces or soups. In traditional Asian medicine it is believed to help treat the symptoms of diseases such as arthritis and to have aphrodisiac properties.
In Mexico “Chinese businessmen came and encouraged local fishermen to extract it when they saw its great value,” said Alicia Virginia Poot Salazar, a biologist and Inapesca representative in Yucatan.
The cartels also fish
In March, an investigation found that from 2011 to 2021, Mexican and US authorities seized more than 100.6 metric tons of sea cucumbers, with an estimated value of $29.5 million.
“Illegal fishing undermines conservation efforts, destroys wildlife populations and ecosystems, harms legal fishermen, steals dollars from governments, undermines good governance and social order, and fuels organized crime,” Teale said. N. Phelps Bondaroff, lead author of the research, in a statement. recent interview.
The document details a series of illegal practices that encourage the trafficking of the species, such as false identification, incorrect labeling, falsified declarations, manipulation of invoices and fraud as a means of laundering illegal captures.
Although the Mexican government has implemented various measures such as seasonal restrictions, quotas, closed seasons and monitoring, the investigation found that the authorities are unable to control the intense trafficking of the species and documents the corruption schemes of local authorities and the use of clandestine facilities to process cucumbers. .
Scholars like Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution have investigated how organized crime groups have infiltrated Mexico’s fisheries.
“I would say that one of the most important findings of my investigation is that it is not only about the presence of drug traffickers from the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in illegal fishing, but that they seek to take over the legal business and all stages of production and marketing to establish a monopoly,” said Felbab-Brown.
In his research entitled “Poaching and wildlife trafficking linked to China in Mexico“, he wrote that due to declining populations of the species, poaching only produces a small harvest that organized crime groups buy from local fishermen to sell to Chinese middlemen.
Low penalties for smuggling?
U.S. authorities frequently detain people associated with sea cucumber smuggling, as was the case of Claudia Castillo, a Mexican citizen who was sentenced to eight months in prison and ordered to pay $12,000 in restitution to the Mexican government for smuggling sea cucumbers from Mexico to San Ysidro, California, in 2018 and 2019.
Also notable is the case of César Daleo, a former Border Patrol agent, who received simultaneous sentences of 30 and 24 months, respectively, for his role in sea cucumber and fentanyl smuggling operations.
Daleo worked as a border agent for 11 years and is believed to have been the leader of a larger network, which was being investigated and monitored by authorities. From 2014 to 2016, and on at least 80 occasions, Daleo paid someone else to smuggle bags of dried sea cucumber from Mexico into the United States. The shipments are estimated to have been worth $250,000.
On March 8, 2018, David Mayorquin and Ramon Torres Mayorquin, owners of a company called Blessings Inc., pleaded guilty to 26 counts of illegally importing more than 128 tons of sea cucumbers from Mexico with an estimated value of $17.5 million dollars into the Southeast Asian markets.
However, the Mayorquines were not jailed and only had to pay $973,490 in fines, $237,879 in confiscated property, and $40,000 in restitution to the Mexican government.
Bondaroff’s research states that a common feature in all these incidents is “the discrepancy between the value of the contraband goods and the fines and restitution imposed”.
As with many wildlife crimes, the fines and penalties are less than the value of the cargo seized and are low compared to the penalties imposed for the smuggling of other illicit goods.
Risking lives to fish
For sea cucumber fishing to be reactivated on the Yucatan coast, there must be at least 70 specimens per hectare, about two and a half hectares. But despite the ban, that number has yet to be reached.
Intense overharvesting has also reduced the species’ ability to reproduce, prompting academic researchers to study how to repopulate them.
“With the boom in fishing, the breeding banks where all the spawners accumulated were decimated, the reproductive capacity of the species was reduced and it is currently very difficult to find good specimens,” said Miguel Ángel Olvera Novoa, scientific manager of the marine station. . of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of Yucatan.
Olvera Novoa and his team took 14 years to achieve assisted reproduction of this species. However, much remains to be investigated.
“Our main objective is to try to produce juveniles to restore populations and try to recover species that were the object of irrational exploitation,” said the scientist.
Another consequence of overfishing is that fishermen must dive to great depths in less explored areas to find the remaining sea cucumbers.
Many of these fishermen are at risk for decompression sickness because they are not well prepared to go this deep and do not have the necessary equipment to adjust their bodies to the pressure changes they experience as they surface.
“Cucumber began to be scarce and people began to get hurt. Some fainted, others arrived with injuries, damaged knees. Some were even disabled. In a season of 15 to 20 days there was a daily death, it was very ugly,” said David Domínguez Cano, a diver and brother of Ricardo Domínguez Cano. In recent years, however, these types of deaths have decreased.
For families like the Domínguez Cano family, the sea is their livelihood and their home, as they hope to preserve their marine animals and their environment.
“We live off this and we’re not going to deplete it,” he said, speaking of the area’s ecology and marine life as he gazed out over the water. “But the people who just come to make money are not interested in keeping it. . We have to take care of everything, that’s our main problem.”