vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #147 / Environment / Reading article...

Lada and Akhan, two polar dolphins, swim through a floating pen littered with popcorn, candy wrappers and a stick from an ice cream bar - and coated with a sheen of rainbow-colored oil.

The sea mammals at Sportivnaya Gavan look healthy enough: They perform tricks on command, lurching from the water to dunk a half-deflated basketball, opening their mouths to permit a trainer to brush their teeth. But their trainers say they are ill from pollution in Amursky Bay.

Trainers fear that if the water isn't cleaned up over the next few weeks, the creatures will die. However a spokesman for the Tinro Institute, which owns the dolphins, says they were sick but have recovered.

"When a south wind blows, it brings in the oil," Angelica Rubets, sea animal trainer, said recently. "This morning there was no oil, and now there is. They're not so active. They threw up. They can't open their eyes normally. Sometimes they don't open their eyes at all."

The dolphins are also losing patches of skin from their bellies and under their fins, Rubets said. And the danger isn't restricted to them.

"Seals catch the fish here, and it's all soaked with oil," Rubets said.

Vladimir Zheravin, acting director for marine mammals adaptation at the Tinro Institute, disagreed with his trainer's assessment, saying the dolphins are on the mend.

"There was a problem with oil," he said. "It's kind of a recurrent problem. It happens every year, but it goes away. It lasted longer this time and caused some pathology."

Yury Pechkin, chief ecologist for the City of Vladivostok, said the city has tried to identify the source of oil in the bay, but failed. There is an oil storage facility in First River, but there are no visible oil leaks from the sewage system into the sea (more than 90 percent of the city's sewage is pumped untreated into the bay).

The city could potentially clean the bay, but doesn't have the money, he added.

The animals hardly live an idyllic existence under the best of times. They were captured in the Sea of Otkhosk and moved to Primorye to see if they would adjust to southern temperatures. They live in pens, attached to a pier across from the Olympiets sports complex, that are 15-by-10 meters and made of rusty pontoons with nets that hang five meters deep. During the winter, the dolphins live under the ice. Workers cut holes through the ice to feed the sea mammals.

The solution would be building an aquarium separate from the sea, in which filtered sea water is flooded into the dolphin's tanks, said Zheravin. But in a city crippled by a financial crisis, nobody is proposing such a project.

Three times a day they perform for the crowd, which at this time of the year comprises mostly tourists on vacation. Rock music from Ace of Base and Mumy Troll blares over the loudspeakers.

"I think it's too little space," said Natalia Perepelitsina, a vacationer from Kamchatka. "I've been to Batumi, and I went to their dolphinarium, and there was much more space. ? Besides, I've seen more active dolphins."