An article titled ‘The use of social media in assessing the impact of war on cetaceans’, authored by zoologists from the Institute of Biology at the University of Rzeszow (UR), was published in March 2023 in the international journal Biology Letters. 

The article dealt with the fate of dolphins and porpoises from the Black Sea, which are threatened with extinction as a result of hostilities related to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. In August of this year, the South Korean portal Sisaweek took an interest in the research results and interviewed the article’s lead author, Professor Ewa Węgrzyn.

The interest and response from Sisaweek readers exceeded the editors’ expectations and initiated a series of comic strips illustrating the extinction of marine mammals during the Ukrainian war. The aim of the cartoons, which illustrate research conducted by UR zoologists, is to educate the younger part of the public about the devastating impact of war on marine mammals.