New stranded harbour porpoise.

Black Sea populations of cetaceans are differentiated genetically from other populations in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Black Sea cetacean species are classified by IUCN category as VU (Common dolphin – Delphinus delphis ponticus), EN (Bottlenose dolphin – Tursiops truncates ponticus and Harbour porpoise – Phocoena phocoena relicta). Most of cetaceans’ populations congregate in Georgian waters in winter. In 2005, the density estimated for Georgian waters was 1.5 porpoises per km 2, 25 times higher than other Black Sea area surveyed. The threats of cetaceans are mostly by-catch, pollution and overfishing. Prior to these threats, population size of cetaceans is decreasing. There’s an urgent need to enforce communication between authorities and monitoring teams as well as capacity building about importance of cetaceans.

Our project will focused on the assessment of cetaceans’ mortality and mitigation of by-catch rate mostly on field surveys. The first stage of the project provides the evaluation of by-catch rate and identification core areas of cetaceans. Second stage will be considering implementation of acoustic warning systems known as “Pingers” in the fishing nets to mitigate cetaceans’ mortality (by-catch). The third stage will involves the development of stranding network and online database. Those actions will be a new challenge in Georgian Black Sea region. In addition, Black Sea cetacean species has conservation importance, because all these three species are sub species of worldwide distributed cetaceans. So that, they carry on the important genetic variation and characteristic which developed after the isolation of the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea before the last glacial period. I understand the fact, that designing a conservation activities in the Georgian territorial waters, where these three species has declined for a combination of reasons, is inherently difficult but achievable.