It is with great sadness that I report the death of Alexey Yablokov earlier today. He was 83. Born in Russia in 1933, Alexey V. Yablokov was a distinguished zoologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and a prominent Russian environmentalist. He was an advisor to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev and was the Special Advisor for Ecology and Health to President Boris Yeltsin. For over three decades, Yablokov sounded the alarm on environmental concerns across Russia and the former USSR and, more recently, worldwide. He was extensively involved with the Chernobyl disaster and with nuclear proliferation issues. Within the marine mammal field, Alexey is perhaps best remembered for his exposure of the extensive campaign of illegal whaling conducted by the former USSR. Following the end of the Cold War, in a speech at the Tenth Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals in 1993, Yablokov revealed that the Soviet Union had been illegally killing large numbers of whales over a period of thirty years, beginning in 1948 (the number of unreported catches turned out to be almost 180,000). Following this, Yablokov organized a group of former Soviet scientists to use formerly secret whaling industry data to correct the catch record for the Antarctic. In the mid-1990s, he founded the independent Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow so that he would have a NGO platform to raise environmental awareness. Yablokov’s role in the formation and leadership of the Russian Marine Mammal Council had a tremendous impact on fostering the current generations of marine mammal scientists in Russia and other former Soviet countries, especially through the conference series on Marine Mammals of the Holarctic. Alexey was a giant in the field, and he will be much missed. Phil Clapham -- Phillip J. Clapham, Ph.D. Leader, Cetacean Assessment and Ecology Program Marine Mammal Laboratory Alaska Fisheries Science Center 7600 Sand Point Way NE Seattle, WA 98115, USA Associate Editor, *Royal Society Open Science* http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/ tel 206 526 4037 email phillip.clapham@noaa.gov