About 1,700 seals have been found dead on the Caspian Sea coast in southern Russia, officials said on Sunday. Officials in the Russian province of Dagestan said it was still unclear what caused the animals’ deaths, but they most likely died of natural causes.
Regional authorities initially said on Saturday that 700 dead seals had been found on the shore, but on Sunday the head of the Caspian Environmental Protection Center, Zaur Gapizov, said after a comprehensive inspection of the coast that the number of dead animals was higher, according to the state RIA Novosti news agency. There were 1,700.
Gapizov said that the soldiers had died a few weeks earlier. He said there was no indication that they had been killed by poachers.
Experts and prosecutors from the Federal Fisheries Agency inspected the beach and collected data for laboratory research, which immediately found no contaminants.
Several previous incidents of mass deaths of seals had been attributed to natural causes.
Data regarding the number of seals in the Caspian varies widely. The Fisheries Agency states that the total number of Caspian seals is 270,000–300,000, while Gapizov’s center puts the number at 70,000.
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