Around 700 endangered seals have been found dead on Russia’s Caspian coast in the North Caucasus, local officials said Sunday.
Caspian seals, the only mammals found in the Caspian Sea, have been classified as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list since 2008.“The number of discovered animals may increase. The cause of death has yet to be determined,” the press service for the region’s fisheries agency said, according to Russian state media outlet TASS.
The seals washed up on the coast of Russia’s republic of Dagestan, along the Caspian Sea, the largest landlocked body of water in the world.
TASS said, “researchers had already started working on identifying the cause of the mammals’ deaths.”The news comes after more than 140 Caspian seals were found dead on Kazakh beaches of the Caspian Sea earlier this year, according to KASPIKA, an agency for the conservation of Caspian seals.
The Alaska snow crab harvest has been cancelled for the first time ever after billions of crustaceans have disappeared from the cold, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea in recent years. The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crabs in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery.
But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Snow crab is by far the most abundant of all the Bering Sea crab species caught commercially,” Daly told CNN. “So the shock and awe of many billions missing from the population are worth noting – and that includes all the females and babies.”
Hundreds of pilot whales have died after being stranded on the shores of New Zealand's remote Chatham Islands, New Zealand's Department of Conservation said on Saturday. Conservation officers said in a statement that they could not actively refloat whales stuck on the island because of "the risk of shark attack to both humans and the whales themselves." It is thought almost 500 pilot whales were stranded.
The Chatham Islands are about 785 kilometres (488 miles) east of New Zealand. Mass strandings are reasonably common on the islands, though marine biologists are puzzled by the phenomenon and are not sure what causes it. New Zealand has one of the world's highest rates of whale strandings, including in 2017, when over 400 whales died after stranding on Farewell Spit at the northern tip of South Island.
About 230 whales have been stranded on Tasmania’s west coast, just days after 14 sperm whales were found beached on an island off the southeastern coast. The pod, which is stranded on Ocean Beach, appears to be pilot whales and at least half are presumed to still be alive, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania said Wednesday.
Incredibly, a similar event happened in the same spot two years ago to the day. I quoted then, on TBW that the whale stranding on the Tasmanian coast was the largest recorded in the state's history, authorities claimed almost 500 pilot whales stranded. I said at the time; "in my 12 years of reporting mass whale strandings I had never reported a total anywhere near this number, it is an absolute astonishing stranding!" Now two years later to the day almost 250 pilot whales are stranded at exactly the same spot, why?
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