Despite months of talks over the fate of the wild caught orcas and beluga whales currently held in Srednyaya Bay, Russia the Ministry of Natural Resources recently announced that the orcas would be freed directly into the waters where their holding pens are located rather than being transported back to their original habitat in the Sea of Okhotsk.
Vyacheslav Rozhnov, Director of the Severtsov Institute for Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said constructing rehabilitation enclosures at a release site 800 miles away would be complicated and too costly and that the authorities do not have a budget for an operation of that scale. Nearly 100 belugas and orcas were captured last summer and kept in small cramped pens by four Russian companies who had planned to deliver the marine mammals to aquariums and marine parks in China for public entertainment purposes. Marine Connection is of the opinion that it is those companies who planned to profit from these animals that are responsible for transporting all the whales back to their home waters in the Sea of Okhotsk.
Eleven orcas were initially caught along with 90 beluga whales but within months, despite very tight security around the pens three beluga whales were reported as getting ‘lost’ and one orca ‘disappeared’. After an international outcry from NGOs, activists, scientists, the public and a petition that raised nearly 1.5 million signatures calling for the animals to be returned to the ocean, the Kremlin ordered local authorities in the Russian Far East to intervene.
Russia is the only country still catching wild orcas and belugas for the public display industry, however on a positive note, plans to capture 10 orcas in 2020 have now been cancelled after the Russian federal marine research institute, (VINRO) in Moscow removed orcas from their ‘total allowable captures’ assessment for that year.
