The adult male whale was found dead a mile offshore last Saturday before washing up on North Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore the next day.Ī necropsy performed by a team of 11 scientists from the Marine Mammal Center and the California Academy of Sciences shows the 39-foot whale was emaciated at the time of death. SAN FRANCISCO - A gray whale that died after spending at least 75 days in the San Francisco Bay was likely killed by a combination of malnutrition and trauma caused by a collision with a maritime vessel, according to officials from the Marine Mammal Center. The Black Sea itself is already highly fragile from decades of heavy industrial and agricultural activity in the north, overfishing in the south and a makeup that leaves little oxygen in its waters and high levels of poisonous hydrogen sulfide.A gray whale that died in the SF Bay was likely killed by a combination of malnutrition and trauma, says officials from the Marine Mammal Center.
Ukrainian scientists are still assessing the level of ecological damage caused by the war. Researchers and organizations from 75 countries signed an open letter in March on the environmental harm of the war, including potential nuclear disaster. Several scientific groups have raised the alarm over growing pollution in the Black Sea caused by sabotaged infrastructure, oil spills from sunken warships and chemical runoff from ammunition. He said that these cases suggest acoustic trauma. While Crimea is inaccessible to Ukrainian conservationists, people have reported mass strandings of common dolphins there too, according to Goldin. In some cases, live dolphins that approached the shore were also visibly weak or dehydrated and showed no sign of infection or entanglement. Bottlenose dolphins are usually too big and nimble to be caught, but Green Balkans said eight were found dead last month off the coast of Bulgaria. Also, 52 harbor porpoises were found tangled in fishing nets in April, compared to 10 that were found last year. Green Balkans, a Bulgarian rehabilitation center, reported that a lone common dolphin was found in a harbor in April, whereas common dolphins rarely break from their schools and usually stay in the open sea far from the coast. These dolphins would be even more vulnerable to naval radars than they were in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian warships in Sevastopol now more numerous and running for longer periods of time.ĭolphins have also been found stranded en masse in Bulgaria and Crimea, showing behavior atypical of their species. “It is hard to say if they can be protective at all, because dolphins look more like victims, like targets in this war,” Goldin said. Konstantin Mihalchevskiy / Sputnik via AP Ukrainian media reported in 2018 that most of the combat dolphins that Russia had seized at the Crimean base had died, likely of starvation.Ī Russian soldier plays with a bottlenose dolphin at the dolphinarium in Kherson, Ukraine, on May 4. Satellite images published last month suggest that Russia may be using bottlenose dolphins to guard its Sevastopol base, but the claims were never confirmed. Still, these deaths and other war-related pollution could create a “crisis in biodiversity,” according to the Turkish Marine Research Foundation.
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Some might also swim into naval mines, triggering their explosion, or could be killed by live fire.Ī full investigation into the causes and scope of the recent dolphin deaths could take months or years, with much of the coastline inaccessible to researchers because of the war. They can also get confused and panic, accidentally swimming into rocks or onto shore. Unable to navigate, the dolphins cannot identify prey and can therefore starve. The low-frequency sonar of warships and submarines directly interferes with dolphins’ echolocation, said Pavel Goldin, a marine biologist specializing in dolphins at the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology in Ukraine.
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