dolphin – Desdemona Despair

A canoe rests on the bank of a dried-out creek in the Amazon rainforest. Transport by canoe became impossible in some places at the height of the 2023 drought. Photo: Lucas Amorelli / Sea Shepherd

December 28, 2023

Amazon rainforest experienced worst drought on record in 2023 – “We’ve never seen anything like this”

By Stephanie Hegarty 25 December 2023 (BBC World Service) – The Amazon rainforest experienced its worst drought on record in 2023. Many villages became unreachable by river, wildfires raged, and wildlife died. Some scientists worry events like these are a sign that the world’s biggest forest is fast approaching a point of no return. As […]

Aerial view of boats stranded in the mud of the parched Rio Negro amid a drought in the Amazonas state of Brazil on 29 September 2023. Photo: Michael Dantas / AFP

October 29, 2023

Drought drains Brazilian Amazon residents reliant on waterways – “It’s every man for himself”

By Orlando Junior 3 October 2023 (AFP) – Not far from the emblematic site where the black waters of the Rio Negro join the brown currents of the Solimoes, two chief tributaries of the Amazon, what once was a lake has given way to a vast stretch of cracked mud. Now, the only water remaining […]

Number of generic extinctions per century among in different classes of vertebrates. The low number of reptiles and amphibia, which underestimate the magnitude of extinction pattern, is probably the result of the lack of information in earlier centuries, where very few species had been described. The dotted line represents the background extinction rate. Graphic: Ceballos and Ehrlich, 2023 / PNAS

September 30, 2023

Study finds human-driven mass extinction is eliminating entire branches of the tree of life – “We’re losing our only known living companions in the entire universe”

By Sean Cummings 18 September 2023 (Stanford News) – The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise […]

A sick sea lion and her pup are shown recovering from domoic acid poisoning at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, California, on 6 July 2023. During the summer of 2023, the center cared for sea lions that were sickened by a historically bad algal bloom along California’s Coast. Photo: Yannick Peterhans / USA TODAY

July 9, 2023

“Death coming out of the ocean”: Red tide killing California sea lions, dolphins – “I have been a marine mammal veterinarian for 35 years, and this is definitely the worst in my professional lifetime”

By Amanda Lee Myers 8 July 2023 (USA TODAY) – Jalapeño the sea lion turned up on a crowded California beach in a daze, experiencing seizures and heavily pregnant. Instead of giving birth in a remote location like sea lions prefer, Jalapeño had her pup on Southern California’s Hermosa Beach on a busy Saturday, surrounded by throngs […]

The body of a dolphin washed up on a beach in a nature reserve in the Odesa region of Ukraine, one of thousands killed in 2022 during Russia’s war on Ukraine. Photo: Ivan Rusev / RFE/RL

December 4, 2022

Tens of thousands of dead dolphins among environmental casualties of Ukraine war – “When the Black Sea was being bombed, we could feel it too”

By Stuart Greer 3 December 2022 (RFE/RL) – A Ukrainian marine biologist estimates that at least 50,000 Black Sea dolphins have been killed as a result of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Ivan Rusev says he’s shocked by the number of dolphin carcasses that have washed up on the shores of his nature reserve in […]

The body of the last freshwater Irrawaddy dolphin in northeastern Cambodia is examined by Department of Fisheries Conservation staff, 15 February 2022. The dolphin was entangled in fishing net and drowned. The Fisheries Administration, in cooperation with WWF-Cambodia, will erect a dolphin statue at the bank of Mekong River at Anlong Chheuteal to commemorate its existence there. Photo: Phen Rattanak / AKP

February 18, 2022

Last freshwater Irrawaddy dolphin in northeastern Cambodia entangled in fishing net and dies – Statue to be erected on bank of Mekong River to commemorate its existence

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, 16 February 2022 (AP) – The last surviving freshwater Irrawaddy dolphin on a stretch of the Mekong River in northeastern Cambodia has died, apparently after getting tangled in a fishing net, wildlife officials said Wednesday. The aquatic mammal was found dead Tuesday on a riverbank in Stung Treng province, near the border […]

A boy looks at the bodies of more than 1400 Atlantic White-Sided dolphins slaughtered on the Skálabotnur beach in the Danish Faroe Islands on 12 September 2021. Photo: Sea Shepherd

September 14, 2021

More than 1,400 dolphins slaughtered in one day in Faroe Islands – “Possibly the largest single hunt of cetaceans ever recorded worldwide”

By Joshua Nevett 14 September 2021 (BBC News) – The practice of dolphin hunting in the Faroe Islands has come under scrutiny after more than 1,400 of the mammals were killed in what was believed to be a record catch. The pod of white-sided dolphins was driven into the largest fjord in the North Atlantic […]

Spatial cumulative extents of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill. (A) Cumulative NESDIS anomaly daily composites integrated from 20 April 2010 to 21 July 2010. Daily fishing closures are marked with gray lines; the cumulative fishing closure area is marked with a thick dashed yellow line. The black star represents the location of the DWH blowout. (B) Cumulative value of daily average oil concentrations (ppb), integrated across the same time span as (A) and across water depths. Vertical depth layers are 0 to 1 m, 1 to 20 m, and in 20-m increments down to 2500 m. Sediment and water samples with higher-than-background concentration are marked in bright green and dark blue circles, respectively. Red crosses in (B) represent approximate locations of DWH-related oil detections reported in previous studies. Daily fishery closures are marked with black polygons; the cumulative fishery closure area is marked with a dashed thick polygon. AB, Apalachee Bay; DP, Deep Plume; EFS, East Florida Shelf; FK, Florida Keys; LC, Loop Current System; TXS, Texas Shores; WFS, West Florida Shelf. (C) Categorization of the modeled oil spill are as follows: (i) nontoxic, PAH concentrations above background level and smaller than 0.5 and 1 ppb at the surface (depth, 0 to 1 m) and in the water column (depth, >1 m), respectively; (ii) toxic-to-biota and invisible, PAH concentrations 0.5 to 17 ppb at the surface and above 1 ppb in the water column; and (iii) toxic and visible, PAH concentrations above 17 ppb. In (C), categories were computed according to maximal concentrations across time. (D) Duration of toxic concentrations across the domain. (E) LC50 of 12 experiments examining the photoinduced toxicity to blue crab (31), fiddler crab (33), mahi mahi (29, 30), red drum (32), and speckled sea trout (32) (for more details, see table S2). (F) The spatial extent of the toxic concentrations from (E); color codes in (F) are according to bar colors in (E), representing concentrations exceeding LC50. In (F), toxic PAH of 0.5 ppb was concentrations were considered for surface waters only (depth, 0 to 1 m). Graphic: Berenshtein, et al., 2020 / Science Advances

February 17, 2020

The toxic reach of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was much larger and deadlier than previous estimates – “Large areas of the Gulf of Mexico were exposed to invisible and toxic oil that extended beyond the boundaries of the satellite footprint and the fishery closures”

By Darryl Fears 12 February 2020 (The Washington Post) – The spread of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was far worse than previously believed, new research has found. As the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history approaches its 10th anniversary in April, a study by two University of Miami researchers […]

Species richness of freshwater megafauna in the year 1500 and in the 21st Century in Europe. Graphic: Fengzhi He, 2019

August 10, 2019

88 percent decline of big freshwater animals over 40-year period – “The results are alarming and confirm the fears of scientists involved in studying and protecting freshwater biodiversity”

By Nadja Neumann 8 August 2019 (IGB) – Rivers and lakes cover just about one percent of Earth’s surface, but are home to one third of all vertebrate species worldwide. At the same time, freshwater life is highly threatened. Scientists from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and international colleagues have now […]

April 1, 2019

Ocean heatwaves threaten survival of dolphins – “The reproductive success of females appears to have not returned to normal levels, even after six years”

1 April 2019 (UZH) – An unprecedented marine heatwave had long-lasting negative impacts on both survival and birth rates on the iconic dolphin population in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Researchers at UZH have now documented that climate change may have more far-reaching consequences for the conservation of marine mammals than previously thought. Shark Bay in […]