In the waters off Mexico, fishing this vital sea creature is banned. It's still happening.

Sea cucumbers, marine animals that "clean" the bottom of the sea, are dwindling in numbers yet they're still illegally fished in Mexico and sold in the U.S. and Asia.

“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.

The numbers of sea cucumbers have not yet recovered enough to allow a resumption of fishing activities, but it's still being done: According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), almost 1,600 tons of sea cucumber were fished in Mexico in 2020.

According to data from the Mexican Government, 100% of sea cucumbers are exported, mainly to the Asian market — Hong Kong and other Chinese cities — and secondly to the U.S.

The Center for Biological Diversity has denounced that the importation of sea cucumber to the U.S. has increased by 36 times in the last decade, and has requested that it be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The FAO estimated that more than 215,000 tons of sea cucumbers were caught from 2013 to 2017 globally. Of that figure, around 7,800 tons were caught in Mexico.

As with other endangered species, 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 cost $600 to $3,500 or more in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities.