2,500 seals wash up dead on Russia shore
About 2,500 dead seals have washed ashore on the edge of the Caspian Sea in southern Russia, officials announced on Sunday.
The cause of the mass die-off wasn’t known, but Russian authorities in Dagestan Province said indications pointed to natural causes.
Regional officials first said there were 700 seals, then upped the figure to 1,700. Sunday brought the estimate of 2,500 or more dead seals, after the province’s division of the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment weighed in.
Pollutants did not seem to be at fault, and neither was there evidence that fishing net entanglement was to blame, authorities said.
It’s not the first time seals have died en masse on these shores. Kazakhstan, whose Caspian coast stretches 1,450 miles, has reported at least three such incidents this year alone.
The landlocked Caspian Sea is the biggest inland body of water in the world, with an area of nearly 250,000 square miles — about twice the size of the Baltic Sea. That’s according to the Tehran Convention, a regional United Nations-affiliated environmental protection consortium among the five nations along the Caspian’s coast.
Surrounded by Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan in addition to Kazakhstan, the Caspian is fed by the Volga, Kura-Araks, Ural and Terek rivers.
The number of seals in the Caspian Sea is not known definitively, but estimates run from 270,000 to 300,000 according to Russia’s Federal Fisheries Agency. The Caspian Environmental Protection Center says it’s more like 70,000.