There's more than drugs coming out of El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel's home state: There's an illegal fish bladder trade going on, too.
A package with 103 dried fish bladders, including some from endangered totoaba that could fetch $10,000 a pop, was seized by the feds last month on its way from the Sinaloa state in Mexico to a house in Southeast Portland, court records show.
Agents from the United State Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) seized the package on May 11, determined it had at least three illegal totoaba bladders among the 100 other yet-to-be-determined fish bladders, and then had a postal inspector deliver it on May 18 so they could executed a search warrant on the home, alongside a customs official who acted as a translator.
The intended recipient of the package, Xiao Bing Chen, has not yet been charged with a crime. Records show her partner listed at that address owns a Chinese restaurant in Bend, an affidavit from a FWS agent said. Totoaba swim bladders, which the massive fish inflate and deflate to control buoyancy, are particularly popular with some Chinese people who are willing to fork over thousands of dollars for one, believing the bladders have medicinal value.
"I spoke with CHEN," reported a FWS agent there during the May 18 search in another affidavit, "who said she used the fish bladders to make soup to improve her health. When I asked her who sent the fish bladders, she eventually stated that it was her nephew, who is a chef at a restaurant in Mexico. According to CHEN, her nephew knew her health was suffering because she went through a divorce."
The investigation into this smuggling is still ongoing; the feds recently issued a search warrant for Chen's phone, looking for more evidence of the smuggling.
NPR recently did long piece on the totoaba bladder ("Chinese Taste For Fish Bladder Threatens Tiny Porpoise in Mexico") that you can listen to here:
Or read it here:
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.