Crew members of the Ausma pilot ship captured the dolphin swimming in the port’s waters on camera.
Valdis Pilats, a zoologist at the Nature Conservation Agency of Latvia, told LETA that the video was not clear enough to determine the species of the dolphin with certainty but that some features suggested that it might be a porpoise. In the expert’s words, this might be the first sighting of a porpoise in winter in Latvia.
Sightings of dolphins and whales of various species in the Baltic Sea have been reported already in the past. Three years ago, a dolphin was seen in the port of Kiel and in August 2015, several dolphins frolicking in the Baltic Sea where spotted by holidaymakers outside the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda.
The Baltic Sea is home to 16 dolphin species, including porpoises, but these mammals are rarely seen and do not stray into Latvian waters very often. They can be seen more often near Poland’s shores.
According to information available in LETA Archive, in October 2003, a porpoise got caught into fishing nets near the Daugava Northern breakwater in the Gulf of Riga.
