At GCC’s Baja field station, students see sharks, dolphins and whales up close

For 40 years, many students attending Glendale Community College have traveled to Baja California where they study marine life or photography.

On Tuesday afternoon, two of the college’s professors who are marine biologists and direct the program spoke to students about the importance of conservation efforts surrounding whales, dolphins and sharks.

For an estimated 541 species of sharks worldwide, fishing has had a drastic impact on them with anywhere from 26 to 100 million sharks caught every year, said professor Javier Gago.

By comparison, he added, for every 10 million sharks, one human may be killed by one of them.

“The reality is sharks have way more to worry about … than you have to worry about them,” Gago said.

Shark-fin soup is part of a billion-dollar industry, driving fishermen to cut the fins off live sharks, and tossing the rest of their body — “only worth cents” — back into the ocean, Gago said.

“Don’t eat shark-fin soup,” he advised.

He pointed to 2010 legislation that prohibits any U.S.-flagged vessel from carrying shark fins that are not “naturally attached to their corresponding carcass” and a law passed in 2012 in China that prohibits Chinese government officials from serving shark-fin soup during official banquets.

In Baja, students swim alongside sharks, such as whale sharks, with GoPro cameras attached to capture the footage.

“I can tell you, it doesn’t get old. You can do this 50, 60 times, you will never forget it in your life,” Gago said.

However, students are not recommended to swim alongside dolphins, said professor Maria Kretzmann, because they will scatter.

Instead, it’s common for Glendale students who travel to Baja to be surrounded by hundreds of dolphins at a time while in a boat, she said.

Last summer, the group also followed a blue whale.

Kretzmann also talked about the danger of losing the Vaquita, a warm-water porpoise, at risk of extinction in the northern part of the Gulf of California, where a ban on fishing across 5 square miles began in March and is expected to continue for two years.

With fewer than 25 mature females said to be remaining, Kretzmann said there’s hope the rare species can survive.

“This is a promising development. We’ll see what happens,” she said.

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Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan