According to the results of the ARC study on the Russian tanker fleet, which activities have already caused an ecological catastrophe in the Black Sea, in particular off the coast of the occupied Crimea, an important comment was provided to our Association by Pavlo Goldin, a leading researcher at the I.I. Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of the NAS of Ukraine.
Professor Goldin noted that in the long term, a particular danger to living organisms is the accumulation in their tissues of toxic decomposition products of petroleum products and impurities containing fuel oil – sulfur compounds and heavy metals. Marine animals consume organic substances, which are petroleum products and products of their transformation by bacteria, and these substances (including toxic ones) are included in food chains (food webs) .
Accordingly, the most affected are the top predators of the ecosystem, which are at the top of the food webs – namely, marine mammals (dolphins and porpoises), seabirds, predatory fish (flatfish, rays, bluefish, bonito, whiting, etc.), and, of course, people who eat a variety of fish. Toxins accumulate in the fat, liver, reproductive organs and can subsequently cause a decrease in fertility, which was found, for example, in marine mammals of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the oil spill from the Horizon platform accident in 2010.
Professor Goldin emphasized that it is important that among the top predators are the species most popular in fisheries – from turbot to rapana. It is also important that usually the top predators are migratory species, and the same bonito or bluefish probably migrates throughout the Black Sea, and some species can even move between the Black and Mediterranean Seas, and fish that have eaten oil products off the coast of Crimea and the Caucasus can sometimes be caught in Bulgaria or Turkey.
“The same applies to dolphins – of course, people do not eat them, but they die in nets, and the sea throws their bodies onto the shores, where they are eaten by birds, dogs, and thus, toxins from them enter new food chains hundreds of kilometers from the disaster sites. And shearwaters from the Black Sea generally fly to the Balearic Islands,” added the Ukrainian expert, also commenting on reports by some “media” that the current ecological disaster allegedly does not threaten the coast of the Black Sea countries of the European Union.

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