Chasing Jaguars by Melissa Cristina Márquez

Author:Melissa Cristina Márquez [Cristina Márquez, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2022-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

“Working again?” Feye teased. He held his phone up in the air, taking selfies with the shimmering blue water zipping past in the background.

“This isn’t a break, Feye.” I smiled. “We are technically still filming.”

After a semi-successful field excursion, Mr. Savage had discovered that Daniela’s husband, Manolo, was a marine biologist who studied the critically endangered vaquita, a porpoise whose numbers had diminished drastically over the last couple of decades. He said he thought it would make a good “change of environment” for the show and wanted to film us swimming around the kelp forests, marveling at the fish.

Really, we all knew it was Daniela’s idea to go visit him because he was near the town that had Alice’s missing camera part. And after a quick pit stop to grab it, we were on our way!

I flipped the page in my field notebook and started writing down an entry for the vaquita since, apparently, there were only a handful of these creatures left.

“Basta, enough writing and enjoy the view, little sis!” My older brother snatched my notebook out of my hands and pointed to our view.

“This is one of the most biologically diverse bodies of water on earth,” said Mom.

“It was formed four to five million years ago, thanks to a tectonic rift between Baja California and the North American Plate, making it one of the world’s youngest seas,” Dad said, finishing her sentence perfectly.

I snapped a pic and sent it to Alessi. I wished she were here to see it in person!

But for all its beauty, it made my heart sink a little knowing that the Gulf of California was an ecosystem in decline. Decades of overfishing had unbalanced this beautiful habitat, taking top predators such as sharks and marlins out of the food chain and leading to a rise in other species that was throwing food webs out of balance. Dad once talked about seeing hundreds of hammerhead sharks at local dive sites here in the seventies … Today, I knew a sighting like that would be rare because fishing here had dramatically reduced their population numbers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.