Ukraine war has led to dramatic increase in dolphin and porpoise deaths from military operations in Black Sea, ‘heartbreaking’ study finds Newseek,according to Rador.
dolphins from a dolphinarium in OdessaFoto: dpa picture alliance / Alamy / Alamy / Profimedia
The study, published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters [academia de științe a Regatului Unit – n.trad.]demonstrated that tens of thousands of cetaceans died in the region – a peripheral sea of the Mediterranean between Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.
As a result, warned the lead author of the study, these animals could completely disappear from the region.
Wars have always made millions of unknown victims among the speechless. But the extent of their suffering is often difficult to quantify and is usually overshadowed by human tragedy. The latest study in this regard provides a stark demonstration that people are not the only victims of the ongoing conflict.
“We wanted to highlight the fact that wild animals are not immune to the devastating effects of war, often enduring great suffering and death,” Ewa Węgrzyn, who is among the authors of the study from the University of Rzeszów, Poland, told Newsweek.
“The extent of animal suffering in wartime is enormous, but the reality is usually not known, for a number of reasons.”
“First, the suffering of other creatures is often overshadowed by human suffering,” she said. “Secondly, doing scientific research in wartime is extremely difficult. And thirdly, monitoring the mortality of some species is difficult even in peacetime, so what happens to them in wartime is even less known.”
The mortality of cetaceans – a family of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises – due to war has never been studied before, according to Węgrzyn.
“The only available data comes from research on military exercises, which take place over relatively short periods of time and have been shown to pose a lethal threat to many species of cetaceans,” Węgrzyn said.
“One of the co-authors of our article, Ivan Rusev, lives and conducts research on the Black Sea coast, being part of the scientific staff of the National Natural Park Limanurile Tuzla. After the outbreak of war he noticed an increase in the number of dead dolphins washed ashore. He received similar news from other countries around the Black Sea.”
Węgrzyn said the news was “particularly worrying” as all three Black Sea cetacean species – the harbor porpoise, the short-beaked common dolphin and the bottlenose dolphin – are on the International Union for Threatened Species’ Red List Conservation of Nature. /…/