The war in Ukraine has led to a sharp increase in the number of dolphin and porpoise deaths during military operations in the Black Sea, a “heartbreaking” study has found news search,by Rador.

The research is published in the journal Biology Letters of the Royal Society [academia de științe a Regatului Unit – n.trad.]demonstrated that tens of thousands of cetaceans died in the region – the peripheral sea of ​​the Mediterranean between Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine.

As a result, the lead author of the study warned, these animals may completely disappear from the region.

Wars have always claimed millions of unknown victims among the speechless. But the scale of their suffering is often difficult to quantify and is usually overshadowed by human tragedy. The latest research on this matter clearly demonstrates 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 suffering great suffering and death,” Ewa Wengzyn, one of the study’s authors from the University of Rzeszów, Poland, told Newsweek.

“The scale of animal suffering during war is enormous, but the reality is usually unknown for a number of reasons.”

“First, the suffering of other creatures is often overshadowed by the suffering of humans,” 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 during wartime is even less known.”

Mortality of cetaceans — a family of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises — due to war has never been studied before, Wengjin said.

“The only available data comes from studies of military exercises, which occur over relatively short periods of time and have been shown to pose a lethal threat to many cetacean species,” Wengjin 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 Limanurile Tuzla National Nature Park. After the war began, he noticed an increase in the number of dead dolphins washed ashore. He received similar news from other Black Sea countries.”

Wengjin said the news was “particularly alarming” because all three Black Sea cetacean species — the porpoise, the short-beaked common dolphin and the bottlenose dolphin — are listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. /…/