The wild-caught animals appear to be suffering from exposure to cold, bacteria, and stress.
Update: On April 8, 2019, the Russian government, in partnership with two American NGOs, announced that all 97 cetaceans will be released back into the wild. The declaration was signed by Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of Russia’s Primorsky region, where the whales are being held. Co-signing the declaration were Jean-Michel Cousteau, founder of the California-based nonprofit Ocean Futures Society, and Charles Vinick, executive director of the Whale Sanctuary Project. Cousteau, Vinick, and their teams have spent the past week at the whale facility in Srednyaya Bay, in Russia’s Far East, assessing the condition of the animals and the facility. In the joint statement made in Nakhodka, a town close to the holding facility, all three declared that they will work together immediately to draft a plan for release and rehabilitation. “Our goal is to release all of them,” the declaration says. (This story originally published on February 6, 2019.)
The video shows a bird’s eye view: dozens of wild beluga whales and orcas trapped in frozen seawater.
Eleven killer whales (also known as orcas) and 87 belugas languish in several rectangular sea pens in Srednyaya Bay in Russia’s Far East. Four Russian firms that supply marine animals to aquariums caught them over the course of several months in the summer of 2018. Their plight made headlines in November, when a drone captured aerial video footage of the facility, leading the media to label it the “whale jail.”
That month, regional authorities opened an investigation into the alleged illegal capture of the marine mammals. Russia’s Prosecutor General warns that selling them to aquariums in other countries, such as
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