At least 2.500 dead seals have been found on the beaches of Russia's Caspian Lake, the Dagestan Ministry of Ecology said, without specifying the cause of the mass death.

The dead animals were found on the ten-kilometer-long Dagestan coast of the Caspian Lake.

The director of the Russian Agency for Nature Monitoring, Svetlana Radionova, said that the "main" cause could be suffocation due to a gas leak from the Caspian Lake.

Radionova indicated that at the end of this week the first results of the analyzes will be known, so it will be possible to say whether there is water pollution.

A similar incident occurred at the end of 2020, when almost two thousand dead seals were found on the beaches of Dagestan and Azerbaijan.

At the beginning of the last century, there were more than a million seals in the Caspian Lake, and today there are about 68 thousand, that is, less than seven percent.