NICOSIA, May 23 (Xinhua) -- The Department of Fisheries of Cyprus said on Thursday that its experts could not establish the cause of death earlier this week of a baby seal. Seals are listed as critically endangered species.
The five-and-a-half-month-old baby seal, named Aphrodite, was found dead on Wednesday by line fishers on a beach near the Tombs of the Kings, a popular tourist site near the western city of Paphos, several kilometers away from its usual habitat in the Peyia sea caves area.
"There is nothing to announce at present, nothing that tells us what is to blame," Harris Nicolaou, who coordinates the Fisheries Department's program to protect the Mediterranean seal (Monachus monachus), told state radio.
He said that experts who performed a post mortem on the dead seal were not able to identify the cause of death.
But he said it was certain that the seal did not drown after becoming entangled in fishermen's nets as she did not have any external injuries, and in any case it would be unfair to blame the fishermen if that happened.
However, there are other possible explanations for the death of the baby seal.
Nicolaou said that the seal had just been weaned and started to feed on fish, and probably developed bacteria that killed it.
"We hope to have a clear cause of death when histological and chemical examinations of tissues from the seal are completed," he said.
Explaining the fact that Aphrodite was found at some distance from her cave, he said that seals, when they become independent of their mothers, cover big distances either to hunt for food or to explore.
Aphrodite was spotted soon after her birth and immediately became the pet symbol of environmentalists, who wage a campaign to halt land development near the seals' usual habitat at Peyia, one of Cyprus's biggest summer tourist resorts, where a house can cost hundreds of thousands of euros.
Monachus monachus is the most endangered seal species in the world and unique to the Mediterranean.
The Fisheries Department could record only 13 such seals near the Cypriot shores, in the vicinity of the Peyia sea caves.
