In the waters off Mexico, fishing this vital sea creature is banned. It's still happening.
Sea cucumbers, which clean the bottom of the sea, are endangered from intense overfishing, yet criminal networks still sell it in the U.S., China and Asia.
PROGRESO, Mexico — Ricardo Domínguez Cano stared at the Yucatán Peninsula's intense blue sea as he remembered a different time, before a vital sea animal was endangered.
“The sea cucumber was not something special, until the prices began to rise a lot,” Cano, 47, told Noticias Telemundo. “Many people then came from other [Mexican] states and settled in Yucatán for the cucumber. And they continued fishing, despite the ban."
"The sea cucumber could be finished," the third-generation fisherman said sadly.
Local fishermen, conservationists and scientists and scholars are sounding the alarm on the dwindling numbers 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), which is in charge of monitoring these animals.
But there's a demand for them, especially in Asia. Due to intense overfishing, sea cucumber populations declined so much in Yucatán that Mexico banned fishing for them in 2013.
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