“Selling wild European hamsters.” I posted this ad on one of the country’s most popular online marketplaces, OLX. I promised healthy and active male and female hamsters. The European hamster is a species listed in Ukraine’s Red Data Book, so I set the price at a minimum of 800 hryvnias (~$20) “per piece.”

For half a day, the ad awaited moderation, but in the evening, it was rejected. This item was on the list of those prohibited for publication.

However, soon after, I made a second attempt. This time, I omitted the full scientific name of the species but provided a detailed description of my endangered fluffies. And just like that, the ad was approved.

I didn’t have a single hamster, and I had never even seen a wild hamster in my life. But if I had one, I could have easily violated the law. Yes, Ukrainian legislation does prohibit the sale of Red Data Book animals and plants. Despite this, such sales were, until recently, thriving openly on perhaps the country’s largest online marketplace platform. 

A Lynx on OLX

On September 7, 2023, near a shopping mall in the Obukhiv district outside Kyiv, two cars pulled up. A fashionably dressed woman and another woman with a notebook stepped out of one. From the other car, a man emerged holding a cat carrier.

— Did you bring the documents for the animal? — the woman with the notebook asked.

— Need documents? We’ll make them! Hold it in your hands, don’t be afraid!

The man took a small lynx out of the carrier and handed it to the stylishly dressed woman. Of course, she should hold it — to fall in love with it and finally decide to buy it! She had been considering it for two weeks. A wealthy young mother had responded to an OLX ad in which the man was offering a lynx. Her daughter had recently watched the “Mavka” cartoon and fallen in love with a character named Kvus, who resembled a lynx kitten. The girl desperately wanted a pet lynx. The man was asking $3,800 for the animal.

As soon as the mother took the lynx kitten, the police appeared. The animal was forcibly confiscated. The stylishly dressed woman was Marina Ivaniusko, a lawyer from the animal rights organization URSA. The organization’s founder Yaroslava Koba, who devised the sting operation, played the role of the assistant with the notebook.

“We asked whether it bites, what to feed it, whether it should be sterilized, how much space it needs. In messages, they assured us it was one of the easiest animals to keep, that it wouldn’t mind living in a house and eating cat food,” Yaroslava recalls.

The man claimed he bred adult lynxes with a male once a year and sold the offspring. The confiscated young lynx was underweight and had numerous health issues.

“It was impossible to go to their location and verify that they were breeding animals — they don’t disclose their address,” says Yaroslava. “At the man’s registered address, there were no lynxes. To track him and search the premises, a warrant is required, but in Ukraine, this is only considered an administrative offense, so no search warrant is issued.” As a result, the seller got off with a fine.

The lynx kitten was named Ursa. It is now undergoing rehabilitation at the Wild Animals Rescue Center in the Kyiv region. Efforts are being made to find it a shelter abroad where it can live in at least semi-wild conditions.

“When this lynx was confiscated, my phone didn’t stop ringing,” recalls lawyer Nina Arzamastseva, who provides legal support for crossing the border with animals. “Strange people were calling, asking if they could get the confiscated lynx back. I started asking them questions. In the end, I told them: forget about it.” 

Not Just the Big Ones

The law prohibits the sale and purchase of not only bears or big cats but even the smallest animal listed in the Red Data Book. That’s why I decided to start my experiment with a hamster.

However, the endangered wild hamster isn’t actually that small — it can weigh up to half a kilogram. It also has a habit of gnawing on everything in the vegetable garden, which is why people usually want to get rid of it.

At the Hamster Rescue Center, they urge people not to kill these animals but to report them to zoologists. Specialists then capture the hamster and relocate it to the wild. The head of the center, Mykhailo Rusin, has often been advised, “Pay people for the hamsters, and garden owners will be more willing to hand them over.” These advisors didn’t even realize the absurdity of their suggestion. And that wasn’t the strangest case. “There was an instance where some unknown individuals wanted to buy up hamsters for 2,000 hryvnias (~$50) each — who knows what for,” says Mykhailo. “We refused, and the matter ended there. But who knows? Maybe they found poachers willing to supply them with animals. We don’t know that.”

One of the most frequently listed Red Data Book animals on OLX were mustelids — ferrets and marbled polecats. Or maybe they were just the most documented cases since zoologists from the Rehabilitation and Care Center for Mustelids in Ukraine have been closely monitoring online marketplace websites over the past few years. Whenever they spotted an ad selling a rare animal, they would contact the sellers and negotiate persistently. The outcomes varied: sometimes, healthy animals were successfully returned to the wild; other times, cases ended in the animal’s death. Like this one did.

In 2020, in the Donetsk region, someone posted an ad for a “domestic ferret” they had found on the street. Experts came across the listing and immediately recognized the animal in the photo — not a ferret, but a rare marbled polecat. The Center’s staff began negotiations. At first, they asked the sellers to release the polecat back where they had found it, if it was healthy. The sellers refused, claiming the animal was limping. Eventually, they agreed to hand it over to a volunteer.

Vika Moiseyeva, director of the Rehabilitation and Care Center for Mustelids, recalls: “When they handed over the polecat, they demanded a ‘reward’ from the volunteer for ‘saving a rare animal.’ The volunteer immediately took the polecat to a vet. There were no issues with its legs, but it had a head wound. In the photos taken right after the animal was caught, there was no visible injury. The wound was a result of holding a wild animal in a space unsuitable for this species. In its attempts to escape the cage, the polecat had injured its forehead. The animal did not survive rehabilitation.”

In 2022, a steppe polecat ended up in private ownership in the Lviv region. The owner also listed it for sale. After a conversation with zoologists, he agreed to release the animal. However, things didn’t go as planned. It turned out that after months in captivity, the polecat’s health had deteriorated. All four of its canines — essential survival tools for ferrets — were broken.

“Most likely, it broke them itself on the cage bars while trying to escape. Later, it developed signs of epilepsy, so the little one had to remain in captivity,” says Viktoriya.

Some animals were successfully rewilded. In 2021, six European polecats that were put on sale in the Dnipropetrovsk region got lucky. The sellers handed them over with little resistance. Initially, though, there were seven polecats, but they gradually weakened, and one didn’t survive. The remaining six underwent rehabilitation and were released back into the forest.

A telling case occurred in the Volyn region in 2024. “We met a man who had ended up with five European polecats. He gladly handed them over for rehabilitation. As far as we know, the animals had been caught by a poacher who was trying to sell them through acquaintances. We released the polecats back into the wild. Later, the same man contacted us again — asking if he should buy an adult polecat from the poacher as well. We asked him to provide information about the poacher.” But that never materialized.

Buying a wild animal is just as much a crime as selling one. As long as there is demand, there will be supply.

Fish Too

Black caviar and sturgeon meat have become so popular worldwide that sturgeon species are now on the brink of extinction. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), sturgeons are currently the most endangered group of species among all such groups.

The Danube basin and the Black Sea remain the last places in Europe where sturgeon populations are self-sustaining, meaning new generations of fish continue to appear. Wild sturgeon fishing has been banned in all countries that have territory within the Danube basin and the Black Sea coastline.

Despite all laws and agreements, sturgeon continues to be traded illegally, with the Odesa region being one of the most active hubs for this trade. Between 2016 and 2023, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recorded 94 cases of illegal sale or purchase of wild sturgeon in Ukraine.

According to various documents analyzed by the WWF, more than 930 kilograms of sturgeon meat and over 50 kilograms of caviar were bought or sold during this period. However, the organization states that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

After the shelling of Odesa began, access to the Danube and Black Sea shores was restricted or even prohibited in some areas. Nevertheless, some people still manage to reach fishing spots — 12 such incidents were recorded in 2023.

There have even been cases where officials, whose duty it is to protect the fish, were involved in illegal fishing. In September 2022, police detained two employees of the State Agency for Fisheries. They had been extorting monthly payments from commercial fishers in exchange for allowing them to fish without interference. These officials permitted excessive catches, including of sturgeon. In return for catching beluga and starry sturgeon — both rare species — the men received 50% of the catch’s value as a bribe.

Is There a Legal Way to Buy a Red Data Book Animal?

Obtaining Red Data Book species for sale (e.g., capturing animals in the wild) is explicitly prohibited by Article 19 of the Law of Ukraine, “On the Red Data Book of Ukraine.”

The Code of Administrative Offenses also effectively prohibits the sale of endangered animals, though the wording might not be obvious to someone without a legal background. The relevant clause refers to the “violation of the procedure for acquiring or selling objects of the animal world” (Article 88-1). However, no such regulation (“procedure”) officially exists. There are, of course, regulations relating to the sale of animals, but they are scattered across various other provisions. In this case, this is the Law “On the Red Data Book of Ukraine” and certain international regulations. Anyone who sells or purchases a Red Data Book animal in Ukraine faces a fine ranging from 1,700 to 3,655 hryvnias (~$41 to ~$90) and the confiscation of the animal.

The sale and purchase of any Red Data Book species within Ukraine are strictly prohibited. However, in some cases, such an animal may be purchased abroad and imported into Ukraine.

The IUCN Red List compiles all species worldwide that are threatened or at risk of extinction.

The international trade in rare animals is regulated by an agreement known as CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. This agreement includes three appendices listing species. Depending on an animal’s status, trade may be strictly regulated or completely prohibited. Appendix I contains all species threatened with extinction. Trade in these animals is banned, though it may be allowed in exceptional circumstances and for non-commercial purposes.

A CITES permit is required to transport a wild animal across a border. Without it, at the very least, the animal will be confiscated at the border.

In some European Union countries, rare animals can be legally bred and sold. In such cases, a Ukrainian citizen can purchase an animal by obtaining a CITES permit. Once in Ukraine, the animal must be registered with the State Environmental Inspectorate. According to lawyer Nina Arzamastseva, birds of prey — such as saker falcons and peregrine falcons — have been imported into Ukraine through this process.

There are breeders in Ukraine who legally breed exotic animals — those not part of the country’s native fauna and not listed in the Red Data Book of Ukraine, though they may still be protected by international law. At the same time, a black market for these species continues to thrive.

Middlemen sell animals from illegal breeding operations, where they are born and raised in completely unsuitable conditions, the lawyer explains. “I received information about a panther cub that died,” says Nina Arzamastseva. “It was kept in such terrible conditions by these traffickers that it never reached a healthy weight. Someone bought it, and the cub died in the buyer’s hands. These black-market breeders have even created a non-governmental organization that issues documents for animals of any species whatsoever. The middlemen refer their clients to this organization, which provides all the necessary paperwork — registration certificates, and various certificates of origin. But in reality, these documents have nothing to do with the animal’s true background. That’s what happened with this panther cub.”

Until about a year ago, the OLX marketplace was flooded with ads selling Red Data Book animals, according to Nina. The platform now enforces stricter controls on prohibited listings, but the illegal market remains active: “People are still creating Telegram channels for sales, closed-group chats — even for Red Data Book animals. Everything has just moved under the radar.”

Main image: Charitable Fund Ukrainian Rehabilitation and Care Center for Mustelids

We meet Leonid Myslyvets, the mayor of Oster, on the banks of the Desna, near the rescue station. He spreads a map of the community over the car hood to show the length of the riverbed—from the village of Bilyky in the north to Krekhaiv in the south, covering over 50 kilometers. Almost every day, rescuers go out on the water here to check if any dead fish have appeared along the shores.

Black Water

Oster lies on the Desna, halfway between Kyiv and Chernihiv. By car, it takes about 1.5 to 2 hours to reach from either city. Just south of the town is the Beremytske Nature Park, where green tourism had been promoted before the full-scale war. However, the russian invasion, followed by russia’s poisoning of the Seym and Desna rivers, significantly reduced the flow of visitors.

The pollution of the Seym in the Sumy region began around August 14, when the first reports of deteriorating water quality emerged. By September, it had reached the Chernihiv region. Social media was flooded with photos and videos showing hundreds, if not thousands, of dead fish along the riverbanks. There were fears that the contaminated water could even reach Kyiv.

From mid-August to mid-September, local authorities and volunteers in the Sumy and Chernihiv regions collected nearly 40 tons of dead fish.

“The poisoned water reached us on September 12. At that time, we set up two small aeration stations along the shore, and from them, we placed tubes into the water—one 40 meters long, the other 70. We punched holes in the tubes, following advice from the department [Desna Basin Water Resources Management],” Leonid explains. “The water is gradually getting oxygenated: our divers went down there and said that fish gather near the oxygen sources to survive.”

We head down to the pier, where we can hear a buzzing sound. These aren’t russian Shahed drones that fly along the Desna at night. Near the water, there are two small pumps, each providing a flow of 400–450 liters [100-120 gallons] per minute. Tubes extend from the pumps into the water, and from the middle of the river, you can see bubbles being carried along by the current.

“The water still isn’t bright and clear enough, but on September 13, let’s say, it was like tar, and there was a dark residue along the banks. Now there’s much less of it. But if the situation worsens, we’ll install more aeration stations—we’ve already arranged with local businesses to add four more of varying capacities,” the mayor of Oster states.

While chatting, we put on life vests brought by Oleksiy, a rescuer. He helps us settle into a boat, starts the engine, and steers us to the middle of the river. We speed upstream. Both banks are empty. Occasionally, a solitary gull soars above the water, or a kite circles high in the sky.

“Fortunately, it didn’t come to a fish die-off in Oster. There’s a key indicator—the level of dissolved oxygen in the water. The normal value is 7 milligrams per cubic decimeter or higher. Ours dropped to 5, and below 4, fish begins to die. Another indicator is chemical oxygen demand, also measured in milligrams per cubic decimeter. The normal level is around 30, but ours reached 50 or more. I know that upstream, it could reach more than 100,” Leonid explains.

A drop in the first indicator and an increase in the second shows that a chemical reaction is consuming oxygen from the water. When fish start dying, they begin to decompose, which also requires oxygen.

“If there’s a fish die-off, they need to be collected quickly. We were prepared for this and are still ready because we read reports of more pollution being dumped into the Seym. The rescue station has six boats and nets to retrieve the dead fish. Even some locals have offered to help. So, I hope we’re ready if it comes to that,” says Leonid.

We approach the boundary of the community along the river. No dead fish are visible along the shores. Currently, in Oster and throughout the Desna and Seym, there is a ban on using the water for any purpose, swimming or fishing. But this doesn’t stop the locals. As we moved upstream, we saw several fishermen: one casting from a boat and two others from the shore. When they noticed us, they pretended they were just relaxing and that the rods and reels weren’t theirs.

“What can you do about them?” Oleksiy chuckles. “Some people just don’t care about bans. I hope they don’t get poisoned. At least at the market, they try to control the sale of dead fish. But how do you control it on the river? Sure, we go out every day, travel upstream. But we can’t be going back and forth all day,” the rescuer complains.

Oleksiy steers our boat into an old part of the riverbed—the natural course of the Desna. The one we had traveled earlier was dug during Soviet times. The Desna, though navigable, was too winding, so they decided to dig a straighter course. During the fish die-off, the old channel became a refuge.

“The fish sought refuge in the old riverbed, these backwaters, to survive. The water here was cleaner—people noticed that. You won’t see it now, though, because the water quality has improved,” explains Oleksiy, peering into the water. “Oh, beaver dens. I hope we haven’t disturbed them too much because beavers are the real masters here,” he adds as we turn back into the newer river channel.

On our way back, we spot tourists with a tent on one of the banks. Leonid remarks that these are the first he’s seen since the river pollution began. Before the full-scale war, up to 300-500 cars would pass through Beremytske Park, that is, its parking lot, every day.

“Usually, from late May to October, people would come to the Desna for camping. In the Oster area alone, there could be as many as 5,000 visitors during the season. Now, the shore is empty. As soon as the news of river contamination broke, people stopped coming,” Leonid explains.

We dock at the shore. The aeration stations are humming. The rescuers tell us that they keep running even during power outages, thanks to a dedicated generator.

How They Dispose of the Fish

The village of Slabyn, located 60 kilometers from Oster, is part of the neighboring Honcharivka community. We meet with the local elder, Serhiy Kraskov, also near the Desna. He’s currently giving an interview to British journalists.

Even though we’re standing on the steep right bank, the wind still carries the heavy, cloying stench of decay from the water. As soon as we descend, the smell hits us with full force. Dark patches are visible on the water, and along the shore, there are black streaks left by residue. However, there are almost no dead fish on the shore—they were mostly collected the day before. Nevertheless, among the shoreline vegetation, some dead crucian carp can still be seen, and a pike about a meter long lies nearby.

“The banks here are overgrown, so a lot of dead fish got stuck there. On Sunday, September 15, we walked along the shore and pulled them out with nets. We had people from the village council, the cultural center, and the medical outpost helping. There were also a few volunteers with boats—they took care of the opposite shore. That day, we gathered almost one and a half tons,” Serhiy recalls.

Simply discarding or burying the collected fish isn’t an option: the decomposition products could contaminate the soil and groundwater. Therefore, a special burial site is needed—a deep pit lined with concrete wells with a concrete bottom. These burial sites are sealed with a similar concrete cover and placed far from water sources and residential areas.

“In our community, there’s still a burial pit left from Soviet times, but it hasn’t been used since the 1980s. I remember talking about it with Chernihiv [the State Environmental Inspectorate in the Chernihiv region] when the foul water reached them, and they were also gathering dead fish,” says Serhiy.

We head out to see this burial pit. It’s a few dozen kilometers of driving along rough field roads. As the car bounces over the bumps, Serhiy continues talking about the die-off: many large fish perished. The biggest one he saw was a catfish about a meter long. They collected bream, crucian carp, and zander, and the most numerous were pikes.

“I don’t know how all this will recover. If both the large and small fish have died, who will lay the eggs? Unless we artificially restock. Plus, maybe something will come down from the upper Desna, where the poisoned water didn’t reach. But even if that happens, who can guarantee that this won’t happen again in a year or two? russia isn’t going anywhere,” Serhiy says in frustration.

We cross the highway connecting Kyiv and Chernihiv and head into dense wooded plantations between fields. In one of these plantations, we stop and get out. From there, we continue on foot along a packed dirt road leading to a deep pit. The closer we get, the stronger the stench becomes. The pit is about four meters deep, roughly the same width, and about ten meters long. If it weren’t for the two concrete wells, it could easily pass for a dugout for armored vehicles.

“Since September 13, I’ve been dealing with this burial pit. We urgently ordered concrete rings from a local business to line the wells. It turned out that in the forty years since it was last used, the burial pit had completely grown over with trees. There was no access, so we had to cut down some of them. Now, we need to lay an asphalt road here,” says Serhiy.

We approach the wells. One is empty, while the other is nearly full of bags sprinkled with chlorine. Despite the concrete lining, puddles are starting to form at the bottom of the pit—a result of the decomposition of the dead fish. The buzzing of green flies, seemingly thousands of them, is unbearable.

“Since we’re a starostat [an administrative unit headed by a starosta—a village elder], bureaucracy moves slowly here: we can’t make quick payments, especially on a Friday evening. But I’m grateful to the local businessmen who delivered the first three concrete rings already on Saturday. And on Monday, September 16, they brought three more. It was all based on trust—they trusted that we’d pay them later. But we needed to bury the fish immediately,” Serhiy explains.

The community ordered a second well just in case, anticipating a larger die-off. However, by September 17, the number of dead fish had decreased, so it wasn’t needed for now.

The filled well will eventually be sealed with a concrete cover and buried. A fence and warning signs will be placed around the perimeter of the burial site so that locals won’t accidentally unearth it a decade or two from now.

New Pollution Incident

On September 17, Serhiy Zhuk, the head of the Environmental Inspection in the Chernihiv region, told UAnimals media that the situation in the rivers of the Chernihiv region had finally improved: “The fish are no longer dying. I can say this because I personally walked along the banks. We still find dead fish, but these are ones that died 3-5 days ago, surfacing from the bottom or from under the roots. Of course, the Seym and Desna waters are still unsafe for swimming. Almost all life there has perished, and an unpleasant odor persists. However, the levels of oxygen, ammonium, and iron are normalizing.”

The Chernihiv and Sumy regions are still calculating the damages, which are currently estimated to be around 450 million hryvnias.

This environmental crime has clear russian involvement. The Department of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of the Sumy Regional State Administration believes that wastewater from a sugar factory in the village of Tyotkino, in russia’s Kursk region, entered Ukrainian rivers. This conclusion was drawn after analyzing satellite images: they show that in early August, the wastewater accumulation basin at the factory was full, but by the second half of August (when reports of pollution in Ukrainian rivers emerged), it had emptied. Moreover, laboratory analysis of the water found substances “specific to sugar production.”

This is not the first time that russian activities have polluted Ukrainian rivers with wastewater. Oleksandr Yemets, a research associate at the Seymskiy Regional Landscape Park, recalled that this had happened at least twice before: in 2011, when an accident occurred at the treatment facilities in Kursk, and the dam near Tyotkino deliberately released polluted water into Ukraine, and again this year at the end of May. On those occasions, fish and crustaceans also perished. Each time, the incidents increased the risk of extinction for a unique species of the region, the Desman, which is on the Red List of endangered animals.

Unfortunately, this might not be the last such environmental crime. On September 16, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources reported further deterioration of water quality in the Seym. Samples taken in the village of Manukhivka (about three kilometers from the russian border) indicated a drop in oxygen levels. Once again, russia is the most likely source of this pollution. However, identifying the exact origin and cause of the contamination is difficult due to ongoing hostilities in the Kursk region, which borders Sumy.

As of September 25, polluted water reached Baturyn in the Chernihiv region. The dissolved oxygen level, as mentioned earlier, was less than one—ranging between 0.3 and 0.8 milligrams per cubic decimeter. In the Sumy region, between the villages of Mutyn and Ozarichi, the oxygen in the water was completely depleted. The next day, the situation in the Seym in the Chernihiv region worsened further.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection assures that this pollution incident is not as severe as the one in August, and the rivers should be able to recover more quickly. However, if a fish die-off occurs again, the border communities will once again have to collect the dead fish from the banks.

This publication was compiled with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework «European Renaissance of Ukraine» project. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation.

There is nothing beautiful about watching a fish fight for its life and slowly die in plain sight.

You have probably seen this before. A trendy boutique, beauty salon, notary’s office, or coffee shop. On the table sits a small, round glass bowl filled with clear water. At the bottom, a few decorative stones, a plastic flower, or even nothing at all. Inside, a goldfish swims endlessly in circles, occasionally gulping air from the surface. What is wrong with this picture? Just about everything.

The very idea of using a living creature purely as decoration is deeply questionable from both ethical and aesthetic standpoints. Few would consider pinning a live cat to a wall or adorning a Christmas tree with hamsters. But fish, as we have come to see, are not regarded in the same way as other animals: they are dispensable. As a result, they can be placed in conditions where they cannot live, just survive for a limited time. Moreover, the only way a fish can communicate that it finds these conditions unbearable is to flip belly-up and die. 

The “serenity” of a fish endlessly circling its bowl is an illusion. Fish are cold-blooded, meaning they conserve energy and do not waste it on unnecessary movement. Under normal conditions, fish swim to migrate, reproduce, interact with other fish in a group, escape danger, or find food. In a bowl, it swims instinctively in search of an exit from its invisible prison. Swimming, it breathes intensely; levels of oxygen dissolved in the water drop, and the fish gulps the upper layer to avoid suffocating. It feels quite like a fish out of water.

A bowl of water is not an aquarium; it is just a bowl of water. Professional aquariums usually include five essential components absent in the container described above:

• Substrate (stones or sand)
• Live aquatic plants
• Lighting, often combined with heating
• An aerator (the device that creates bubbles)
• A filter for water purification

These are the necessary components that bring the aquarium closer to the natural environment in which fish are used to living. Even with these features, the aquarium is still a very limited space (in nature, fish usually live in much larger reservoirs), and its conditions are far from adequate.

Aquarists consider a lot of aspects: fish native to the Amazon and South Asia require different water acidity, different soils, light, temperature, water volume per fish, and so on. They also need different food: not everyone likes stinky crustacean powder. Of course, aquarium fish have changed their habits over decades of captivity and breeding, but there are no conditions that are completely suitable for each and every one of them.

For example, everyone knows guppies — small livebearer fish native to South America. In the wild, they live in overgrown, warm bodies of water with little to no current and are popularly considered “universal.”  The logic goes: they are low-maintenance, you can gift them to a five-year-old for their birthday, toss them into a 20-liter aquarium, and let them figure it out — they’ll adapt, maybe even breed. Next, someone will add tiger barbs — fish that, in nature, live in streams, love clean, oxygen-rich water, and need space to dart around. Then they will throw in an ancistrus so it can cling amusingly to the glass (though it will not live long without specialized plant-based food). And to top it off, a pair of angelfish — because they are so beautiful. Never mind that an aquarium of that size would be cramped for even one angelfish. But the fish swim, eat, live.

How do they feel? Probably like passengers crammed into a train compartment: spending a single night there might be bearable, but imagine a month or a year…

It is no surprise that fish often jump out of such “aquariums” and die. It is not suicide — it is their instinctive attempt to escape an adverse environment.

By their psychological makeup, most fish are hardcore survivalists. In their natural environment, they face floods, droughts, food shortages, diseases, predator infestations, and they have to be able to adapt to all of them. Wild cousins of the goldfish — crucian carp — hibernate under ice, burrow into the silt in summer, survive long periods out of the water, and are quite promiscuous eaters. But for no species of fish is it natural to spend most or all of their time in a small volume of stagnant water, without substrate or plants. So, while people might relax and relieve stress watching fish dart around in a jar, the fish themselves are stressed (yes, fish stress is scientifically proven) and suffering.

To avoid torturing your fish, start by reading a book on aquaristics. I emphasize: a book, not a Google search, since searching for anything related to aquarium fish online will bring up hundreds of ads from pet stores and manufacturers. There, you will read that anything is suitable for any kind of fish — just make sure to buy that “anything” from that specific brand or store.

A good book on aquaristics might sour your mood: you will need to step out of your comfort zone to follow its recommendations. Properly setting up and maintaining a humanely (towards fish) equipped aquarium is a long and tedious job.

Imagine needing a special kit to test the chemical composition of water! The fish species you are eager to combine will turn out to be incompatible, and simple solutions like plastic plants will be unacceptable. Even if you buy a spacious enough aquarium, it will likely become too small in a year as the fish grow. Tossing a bunch of colorful fish into a tiny volume of water and making them sparkle to liven up your home will not work. You would be better off with a plasma screen and a screensaver.

Companies and professionals who design aquariums for aesthetic purposes often care more about looks than the well-being of the fish. In contrast, in the broader context, being a professional aquarist is not as much about arranging pebbles according to feng shui but about ethics and responsibility.

“Remember that at the core of this hobby, we are ultimately responsible for the well-being of living creatures, and we should always act in their best interest… Even if other [aquarists] do not…,” reflects Canadian aquarist Derek Tustin. Whether aquariums are ethical in principle is a serious discussion, with animal rights advocates and fish breeders as obvious opponents; however, by accepting criticism and understanding societal trends in how animals are treated, professional aquarist associations are declaring as their priority the welfare of fish and ensuring they live in dignified conditions. For example, our own All-Ukrainian Association of Aquarists, although primarily focused on competitions, lists as one of its goals “promoting the humane treatment of animals and providing consultative assistance in creating optimal living conditions, as close to natural as possible.”

(Just in case, a reminder: “liberating” aquarium fish and other aquatic creatures by releasing them into ponds or rivers is very dangerous. It can harm not only the fish, turtles, and snails themselves but also entire ecosystems. Not only exotic but also native animals and plants should not be released after being kept in an aquarium. But that is a topic for another discussion.)

If someone takes on the responsibility of caring for a piece of aquatic habitat with its specific inhabitants, they should fully commit. This commitment is expensive and exhausting, ultimately limiting the community of aquarists to true enthusiasts and professionals who know what they’re doing. And the owner of a jar with a goldfish should be firmly told that they’re slowly killing their pet in plain sight—and there’s nothing beautiful about it.

The texts in the Columns section reflect only the author’s opinion and do not necessarily align with the position of UAnimals media’s editorial team.

Once known as the Grand Meadow, the ancient Ukrainian steppe, the area has become the bed of the Kakhovka Reservoir by Soviet engineers who built a dam. The recent act of ecocide by the russians, who blew up the dam, has been studied under the #StopEcocideUkraine project to understand how nature is recovering.

Seventy years ago, the floodplains, meadows, and steppes in the south of Ukraine were teeming with life, flourishing with wild vegetation, abuzz with birds, and home to various fish and reptiles. Between 1955 and 1958, Soviet engineers flooded this area to create the Kakhovka Reservoir, submerging a fascinating and diverse landscape that decayed under the water for decades. This stagnant water bloomed with cyanobacteria.

Despite the degradation, over 65 years, the Kakhovka Reservoir developed important A biotope is an area of land or a part of a body of water with a homogeneous relief and a range of living organisms inhabiting it.biotopes, mainly colonies of waterfowl.  

Additionally, a water supply system was built around the reservoir, providing fresh water to southern Ukraine.

In June of last year, the Kakhovka Reservoir drained due to the dam’s destruction by russian forces, exposing approximately 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles) — an area the size of 250,000 football fields. 

This raised concerns about the freshwater supply for parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and even Dnipropetrovsk regions.

The government plans to restore the reservoir. According to a government decree, during the war and for five years after, the Kakhovka area can only be used for restoring the reservoir and constructing hydraulic facilities. 

However, some ecologists argue this is a flawed idea, suggesting that a more valuable biodiversity area could develop in place of the stagnant water body.

In any case, realistically, reconstruction is impossible as long as most of the reservoir’s left bank remains occupied by hostile forces. Currently, nature is the sole designer and builder of the former reservoir bed.

Dnipro Floodplains. Photo by Viktor Petrochenko

Science Under Fire 

“It was just mountains of trash. We called them ‘horkulents.’ Whatever the russians ate, they threw away, plus they stole various items from the village: carpets, chairs, and tables. It was all lying out in the open,” recounts botanist Ivan Moisiyenko, co-founder of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, about his first trip to the reservoir shore. He arrived at the Kamianska Sich National Nature Park three weeks after Kherson’s liberation — on December 1, 2022.

The national park removed the trash, but trenches and dugouts left by the invaders still remain: for over a month, that territory was a battlefield.

Subsequent trips by the botanist to the now-former reservoir were not without danger, “My colleague and I were accompanied by park staff because the area was heavily mined: you need to know where to walk. The first time, we traveled along the Kherson-Beryslav-Marianske road (over the former reservoir). At the checkpoint, we were warned of the threat of FPV drone attacks. The next time, this road was already closed because FPV drones had been attacking civilian cars. We had to take a long detour.”

The very act of researching the area is highly risky. Being on the former reservoir’s territory means being within reach of russian artillery. Additionally, any movement could trigger a reaction from enemy strike drones.

“Research can be cut short very quickly — just as you’re starting,” says Vasyl Kostiushyn, a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences and a researcher at the Institute of Zoology.

This is how scientists study insects. Photo provided by Oleksiy Vasyliuk

Botanists at least have the chance to study the vegetation at the former shore’s edge or use aerial photography. Zoologists, however, need to venture deeper into the territory. Completing most tasks quickly is not feasible, explains ecologist Oleksiy Vasyliuk, head of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, “To study land animals, you need to set up special zoological traps of various types and inspect them every half hour. For a complete picture, insect studies are necessary. Different species fly at different times, so such expeditions need to be conducted multiple times. Many insects are nocturnal, and to learn about them, you need to set up powerful spotlights and use them for several nights.”

To observe large mammals, camera traps are placed along their paths, which first need to be located. “There is no information about the current state of the reservoir’s fauna. It’s unknown if zoological research can be conducted before full de-occupation,” adds Oleksiy Vasyliuk.

So, what have researchers managed to discover in the year following the catastrophe?

The Grand Meadow is Not Really a Meadow

The area filled by the reservoir in the 1950s is historically called the Grand Meadow (Velykyi Luh). Be careful, though, as the name can be misleading. Before the flooding, this area comprised not only meadows but also a network of channels, lakes, swamps, floodplain forests, and steppe fragments.

Oleksiy Valysiuk explains that, until the 1950s, this was the number one area in Ukraine for biodiversity, “Looking at the relief of this territory, one can assert that it housed the most diverse and dynamic landscape in Ukraine. It played a crucial role in global seasonal bird migrations. Since the 1920s, scientific and state institutions had been striving to create a nature reserve here.”

The Institute of Zoology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, after studying satellite images, concluded that there is hope for the restoration of the channels and floodplains. The relief under the water’s surface hasn’t leveled out; it still retains the depressions of former floodplains and swamps.

Satellite image taken on July 15, 2023. Source Wikimedia Commons

Already, the Kamianka River, which had been buried under stagnant water for 65 years, is flowing through the area.

However, it is futile to hope that nature will regenerate exactly as it was before the reservoir, says biologist Vasyl Kostiushyn. “All the distributaries and floodplains form when the river is alive, meaning there are annual floods. But now the Dnipro’s course is almost nowhere natural: it’s entirely regulated by reservoirs. We can’t know if there will be floods,” explains the scientist.

He doubts that the Dnipro will be allowed to return to its natural course. Canals used to branch off from the Kakhovka Reservoir, supplying water to the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the Kryvyi Rih district, and, in the past, Crimea. Additionally, groundwater was connected to the reservoir. Part of the water from this reservoir reached wells, as the natural groundwater is brackish and unsuitable for drinking.

“Biological diversity is unlikely to be a priority. I hope the government will agree to at least an intermediate solution,” says Vasyl Kostiushyn.

The Institute of Hydrobiology has proposed such a solution: they want to separate the shallow northeastern part of the river from the reservoir with a dam. If this dam also regulates the water level, it could simulate a flood, explains the biologist. This would create meadow and floodplain biotopes: it wouldn’t be exactly what existed before the Kakhovka Reservoir was created, but it would resemble the previous landscapes of the Grand Meadow.

Floodplain with water lilies. Source: Grand Meadow National Nature Park

Vasyl Kostiushyn suggests, “I think this area will be a mix of open biotopes and sections overgrown with shrubs and new forests. Without water, it could become a desert.” On the bottom of the former reservoir, a whole tapestry of ecosystems could appear. What it will be like entirely depends on the water level.

The Victorious Willow and Valuable Steppe

The former reservoir bed has turned green with willows. This both surprised and pleased botanists: they feared it would become overgrown with alien species. The willow grew on the silt. But the willow shoots will still struggle for survival — over time, the thickets will thin out in this struggle.

Additionally, in the areas accessible to researchers, the petrophilous (rocky) steppe should have been restored — a valuable site for biodiversity not only in Ukraine but in Europe as well. Therefore, botanical expeditions studied the limestoneRock outcrops are bare, exposed rocks that are older than those that cover them. outcrops

on the slopes of the ravines. The steppe was slow to regrow, says Ivan Moisiyenko: 

“My theory is this. The steppe areas that exist now were separated from the reservoir by willow thickets, reeds, and shrubs. The steppes that existed before the reservoir and are now exposed are isolated from other steppe areas. The seeds of steppe species did not reach that limestone. We started looking for a place where the steppe almost reached the water. And we found it.”

There, researchers found about 10 steppe species. For example, they added the toadflax (Linaria macroura) to the herbarium. Ivan Moisiyenko says, “I believe the steppe will restore itself on the outcrops that were the reservoir’s bottom. But it will take some time for the seeds to reach them.”

Fans of the Current

In the final years of the Kakhovka Reservoir’s existence, about 46 fish species were recorded there, explains ichthyologist Yuliya Kutsokon. The reservoir was home to common roach, common bream, silver carp, and Black Sea sprat. However, the dominant species was the Prussian carp, “It made up about 70% of the entire catch. This is an invasive fish species,” says Yuliya. This carp, by the way, is not demanding in terms of water quality and can live in silted waters with low oxygen content. Most of its neighbors were also foreign to the Dnipro, artificially reproduced for fisheries.

Before the reservoir was built, the fish fauna in this section of the Dnipro was richer and more diverse, with around 60 species: beluga sturgeon, Russian sturgeon, Pontic shad, Vimba vimba, Black Sea roach, common nase, Alburnus sarmaticus, blue bream, white-eye bream, gudgeon, Dnipro barbel, weatherfish, burbot, Donets ruffe, and European flounder. In the reservoir, these species either disappeared or their numbers decreased so drastically that no one had seen them for many years.

“If this section becomes a river again, it will definitely have a positive impact from a conservation perspective,” says Yuliya Kutsokon. Then, populations of rheophilic fish — those that love currents — might have a chance to appear.

For instance, a current is needed for the spawning of sabrefish, says Yuliia: “Sabrefish needs a large river. Its eggs develop in the water column but must have a current; otherwise, the eggs settle and die.” Sabrefish is included in international conservation lists.

Additionally, species that migrated from the sea to the river could gradually reappear if any remain either in the lower Dnipro or its tributaries. “Desna, for example, is a powerful place for preserving many rheophilic populations. It has an interesting fish, the common nase. The Sluch has the Dnipro barbel — now an extremely rare fish listed in the Red Data Book. Perhaps something will return here as well.”

Among mammals, beavers and river otters, which still live below the former reservoir, may come to the floodplains.

And What About the Land?

The animal world will depend on the tapestry of biotopes that form. Open water and shallow areas will attract waterfowl, says Vasyl Kostiushyn. If it is dry, the area will host larks and wheatears; if there are bushes, warblers and various passeriformes will appear; if forests develop, thrushes, woodpeckers, and birds of prey will settle there.

“Foxes might already be exploring these areas. The wild boar — an undemanding animal — uses everything from reed ponds to ancient forests,” says the biologist.

What the fauna of the Grand Meadow was like before the flooding is not precisely known, says Oleksiy Vasyliuk, “There is no paper that properly describes this area, nor is there any living zoologist who remembers the territory before the flooding.”

The Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group hopes to organize zoological expeditions as soon as it becomes possible. They promise to publish more detailed studies about the state of the animal world on the bottom of the former reservoir and the prospects for the Grand Meadow.

Main photo: Kamianska Sich National Nature Park in August 2023. Vegetation on part of the riverbed. Photo by Serhiy Skoryk

This publication was compiled with the support of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework «European Renaissance of Ukraine» project. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union and the International Renaissance Foundation.