Bottlenose Dolphin is the most common representative of the Delphinidae family. Bottlenose dolphins can be meet almost anywhere in temperate and warm waters – from the Falkland Islands in the south to the coast of Greenland in the north. And in the Black Sea is a special situation. It is a home to an endemic subspecies of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus ponticus), which is called by all Black sea peoples with a name originated of Greek language – “afalina”.
In the last century the industrial extraction of dolphins in the Black Sea was in full swing until the prohibition of fishing by the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania in 1966 and Turkey in 1983. Even 30-40 years ago, bottlenose dolphins were regularly dead in creeps. Ban of bottom trawling did not fixed the problem – even nowadays dolphins die in the poachers creeps. Depletion of fish stocks, the deterioration of the ecology of the Black Sea as a whole and the slow reproduction of the animals – these and other factors have led to the fact that the Black Sea bottlenose dolphin subspecies listed in the International Red Book in the category EN – «endangered”.

The PHOTOTEAM.PRO has published a printed book dedicated to the afalinas in Russian “Быть дельфином” (Being a Dolphin), also an iBook named “100 Facts About Dolphins” in English and Russian about bottlenosed dolphins.