Kyiv, Ukraine – Fishers and poachers along the Black Sea coast often find suffocated dolphins entangled in their nets, They release them by cutting off their fins and dropping them in the sea. Their bodies, with net marks on their skin, are often washed ashore. Fishing and poaching in littoral Black Sea nations plummeted because of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, as Moscow strove to occupy all of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.
It failed – but the ongoing hostilities have been killing “hundreds times more” bottlenose and short-beaked dolphins and harbour porpoises, according to Ivan Rusev, head researcher at the Tuzly Lagoons national park in southern Ukraine. In 2022 alone, some 50,000 dolphins died this way, and by 2026, the number exceeded 120,000, or one in four cetaceans in the Black Sea, Rusev told Al Jazeera. Dolphins are apex predators, and their decimation further ruins the Black Sea’s ecosystem already affected by chemicals from munitions, spills of oil, fuel and vegetable oils from dozens of sunk or damaged warships, tankers and freighters.
Many dead dolphins still have their fins, but look starved. Explosions, launches of cruise missiles from warships, and military sonar systems confuse them, deafening their primary survival tool, echolocation, and making them unable to navigate, communicate and hunt. The dolphins switch to consuming their blubber that has already accumulated pollutants from wastewater, agricultural runoff, microplastics and antibiotics.
The self-poisoning incapacitates their immune system, and they succumb to lethal respiratory tract infections caused by the so-called morbillivirus. The Black Sea is one of the world’s youngest – some scholars hypothesise that it was a freshwater lake until about eight millennia ago, when the Bosporus Strait burst open, causing what may have been the biblical Great Flood. The sea’s waters lack oxygen and support no fauna or flora below 50 to 100 metres.
The chronic environmental damage from the war was aggravated by another shock: the 2023 destruction of the giant Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, releasing most of its 18 cubic kilometres (4.3 cubic miles) of water contaminated with fertiliser runoff, heavy metals and machine oil. Fish species such as mullet and bluefish have become scarce, even though fishing in Black Sea nations has been affected by restrictions, bans and naval mines that were spotted near Istanbul. The changes inevitably affect the dolphins.
Environmentalists from other Black Sea nations – Bulgaria, Romania, Turkiye – also reported a spike in dolphin deaths, even though the cause of their death couldn’t always be established. He agrees with Rusev that “sonar systems of warships and submarines definitely affect cetaceans and their echolocation and hearing abilities”. Meanwhile, Russian environmental monitors blamed the dolphin deaths on “parasites” and “virus infections” without any further explanation.
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