Captures Tip the Balance for the Black Sea Dolphins

Widely exploited for meat and oil for decades, the Black Sea subspecies of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus ponticus) has been proposed for increased protection by the former Soviet state of Georgia. Changing the dolphins' CITES listing as requested from Appendix II to Appendix I would ban all commercial trade.

Even after hunting dolphins for food was banned in the former USSR, Bulgaria, and Romania in the 1960s and in Turkey in the early 1980s, the dolphins continued to suffer as incidental victims in fisheries from diseases spread by increasing pollution and immune deficiencies and through the occasional intentional roundup and slaughter. Add to these threats the extensive development of coastal areas and the depletion of the prey species of the dolphins, we see a population unable to tolerate the pressure that came along over the last ten years from aquariums and amusement parks taking live specimens for public display. Out of 120 individuals known to have been captured and sold internationally, 52 are known to be dead. This number doesn't include the additional 25-50 caught yearly to supply the oceanaria in countries surrounding the Black Sea.

Recognizing the threat of these ongoing captures, an international treaty organization of the region (Agreement on the Conservation of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Areas-ACCOBAMS) has backed the increased CITES protection as a way to curtail the international traffic in the dolphins. AWI wholeheartedly agrees.