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Jonas Johnson posted an update
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ecological costs of warfare and militarism—from the US DOD’s outsized role in climate change as one of if not THE LARGEST polluter on the planet, to the militarized response to global insecurities born from climate catastrophe, to the weaponization of the environment against occupied Palestine. This headline caught my eye as just one more example of the wide ranging entanglements of military-industrial-ecology: the weaponization of marine life in the pursuit of military objectives, alongside the disruption of native species as a forseeable externality of our will to dominate others. Something so tragically poetic, that we deafen and disfigure entire marine communities through our bellicose desire to see, using a technology borrowed from these same seafaring mammals…
Godspeed, Flipper, and don’t look back!
The Russian Black Sea Fleet first deployed bottlenose dolphins in Sevastopol back in 2018, apparently as a defense against Ukrainian saboteurs… But Russia’s war has been cruel to the native dolphins. Explosions, pollution and the overuse of loud active sonar all have taken a toll on the roughly 400,000 dolphins and porpoises who lived in the Black Sea prior to 2022. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of otherwise healthy cetaceans have died as a result of the war.
forbes.com
So Long And Thanks For All The Fish! Russia’s Naval-Defense Dolphins May Have Escaped.
A storm breached the pens, in Sevastopol harbor in occupied Crimea, where the Russian navy kept its specially-trained dolphins.
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Worth also adding for those who don’t know; it’s impossible to understate just how loud active sonar is. If there is a diver– or anything else fleshy and unprotected from the intense sound waves– near a submarine that turns on it’s active sonar…. The shockwave alone would instantly turn their insides to jelly.
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