(Almaty) More than 130 seals of a species threatened with extinction in Kazakhstan have been found dead stranded on the beaches of the Caspian Sea, in the west of the country, we learned on Wednesday, without the causes of this carnage are established at this stage.
Posted at 9:36
“Carcasses of dead seals have been discovered,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Ecology of Kazakhstan, a vast country in Central Asia bordering the Caspian, the largest closed sea in the world, told AFP.
The ministry specifies in a press release published on Tuesday that “131 seals were found on the coasts of the Caspian Sea in the district of Toupkaragan (Manguistaou region)”, in the west of the country.
Autopsies will be carried out and the Central Asian Institute for Environmental Studies has indicated that soil and water samples taken from the scene will be analyzed.
The Caspian seal, the only species of seal present in this sea, was placed by the Kazakh government in November 2020 on the list of rare and endangered animal species.
In addition to pollution, this mammal is threatened by poaching.
The Caspian Sea borders five countries: Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it had more than a million seals (“Pusa caspica”), of which only 68,000 adult specimens remain today, i.e. less than 7%, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. nature (IUCN), which considers the species “endangered”.
Intensely hunted until recently, this mammal now suffers above all from industrial pollution, which makes it particularly sterile.
According to the UN, this pollution is linked to the oil industry, radioactive and industrial waste, or even large volumes of wastewater.
The fauna and flora of the Caspian also suffer from the drop in sea level caused by climate change, with rising temperatures leading to water evaporation.
In December 2020 and May 2021, nearly 440 Caspian seals were found dead on beaches in the Russian republic of Dagestan (southwest).