Marine mammals

Three species of dolphin live in the Black Sea — the bottlenose dolphin, the common dolphin and the harbour porpoise — each recognised as a distinct subspecies found only in this basin and nowhere else in the world’s oceans. All three are threatened.

A Legacy from the Past

Until the mid-20th century, dolphins in the Black Sea were the target of large-scale, deliberate hunting for meat and oil — populations at the time were estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Targeted hunting was gradually banned by the coastal states, but the populations never fully recovered, and their exact numbers today remain difficult to estimate.

The Main Threat Today — Bycatch

The most common cause of death for dolphins in the Black Sea is not direct hunting, but accidental entanglement in fishing gear — known as bycatch. Caught in gillnets or bottom-set nets, the animals cannot surface to breathe and drown. The true scale of the problem is hard to assess precisely because it happens at sea, out of sight of observers, and a large share of cases go unreported.

More Than Just the Nets

Beyond bycatch, the populations face slower, harder-to-track pressures — a shrinking supply of small fish due to overfishing, noise pollution from shipping that interferes with their echolocation, and periodic disease outbreaks within the population. Individually, none of these factors is usually fatal, but together they keep the numbers of all three subspecies persistently low.

What We Do

We monitor publicly available information on bycatch incidents and on the health status of the populations, and we support the enforcement of existing protection under the EU Habitats Directive, which lists all three Black Sea dolphin subspecies among the species of Community interest. Better alignment between fishing practices and conservation requirements is key to the long-term survival of these populations.