Ukraine's protected lakes in Tuzly estuaries dried up because of war and drought
Fishers were left without fish, and birds were left without places to feed
The Tuzly Lagoons National Nature Park jas a system of small inland lakes near the sandbank on the border with the Shahany and Karachaus estuaries. This natural ecosystem is protected. These are the lakes named after Academician Yuvenalii Zaitsev, the Ukrainian scientist.
This year they dried up, and now the landscape looks like a desert. This is reported on the Facebook page of Tuzly Lagoons park. Now the bottom of the lakes is covered with crusts of dry earth.
Scientists of the national park identified several reasons for the lakes drying up:
- First, this year almost no water enters the estuaries and lakes from the sea: the sand bar cannot be broken due to military operations in the Black Sea. On the Facebook page of Tuzly Lagoons park, they also note that "the fact that the Odesa Regional State Administration, namely the Deputy Head of the Regional State Administration Oleh Muratov and the Department of Ecology of the Regional State Administration Pavlo Bulanovych, illegally blocked the issuance of permits to local fishers, who were willing to pay for with their funds, to do such an important environmental work, also played a role."
- Second, there was no flow of fresh water through small rivers into estuaries.
- Third, this year the water level in the Danube River has been deficient over the last decades. Therefore, the water in the Dzantsheiskyi and Maly Sasyk estuaries does not come from the Danube nor replenish the lakes.
"That's why the fishermen were left without fish, and the evaporation of water from the estuaries, amid the lack of water exchange, has now led to the complete drying up of the protected lakes, where the unique birdhouses of shelducks were concentrated," Ivan Rusev, the park's leading scientist at the hundred-year-old nature park, reports.
