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‘Little hope’ of saving stranded beluga whale in Seine
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Fading hope: A beluga whale is seen swimming on Friday in the Seine River, near a lock in Courcelles-sur-Seine, western France. Rescuers have been trying to find a way to help the malnourished marine mammal. (AFP/Jean-François Monier)
H
opes of saving a malnourished beluga whale that had swum up the Seine River were fading on Sunday as rescuers said they were in a race against the clock to find a solution.
The whale was first spotted on Aug. 2 in the river that runs through Paris to the English Channel. Since Friday, it has been between two locks some 70 kilometers north of the French capital.
But leaving it in the warm stagnant water between the lock gates is no longer an option.
"He has to be moved in the coming 24-48 hours, these conditions are not good for him," Sea Shepherd France head Lamya Essemlali told AFP.
Specialists held out "little hope" for the visibly underweight whale, as they were "in a race against the clock" to save the creature, Essemlali said.
"We are all doubtful about its own ability to return to the sea," she said. "Even if we 'drove' it with a boat, that would be extremely dangerous, if not impossible.”
Before swimming between the two locks, "he had the tendency to be heading toward Paris. It would be catastrophic if he reached there”, Essemlali said. However, "the euthanasia option has been ruled out for the moment, because at this stage it would be premature".
The whale still had "energy” and “turns its head, reacts to stimuli", she said after a meeting of experts and French officials.
Although rescuers have tried feeding it frozen herring and then live trout, the animal refused the food.
"His lack of appetite is surely a symptom of something else. [...] an illness. He is malnourished and this dates back weeks, if not months. He was no longer eating at sea," Essemlali said.
On Saturday, veterinarians administered "vitamins and products to stimulate its appetite”, said a statement on Sunday by the police in Eure, Normandy, which is overseeing the rescue effort. The small spots on its pale skin that were reported on Saturday were due to the freshwater, it said.
Another option under consideration would be to take it out of the water, give it vitamins, check the cause of the illness and eventually ship it out to sea once it had regained its strength.
Another was "to let it end its life peacefully, like someone who is very ill and who does not have much chance to live", said Isabelle Dorliat-Pouzet, a senior police official in Evreux.
Rare sighting
Belugas are normally found only in cold Arctic waters, and while they migrate south to feed as ice forms in the autumn, they rarely venture so far. An adult can reach up to 4 meters in length.
According to France's Pelagis Observatory, which specializes in sea mammals, the nearest beluga population is off the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway, 3,000 kilometers from the Seine.
It is only the second recorded sighting of a beluga in a French river since 1948, when a fisherman in the estuary of the Loire River found one in his nets.
The sighting comes just a few months after an orca, also known as a killer whale but technically part of the dolphin family, became stranded in the Seine and was later found dead between Le Havre and Rouen in late May.
A necropsy found that the animal, more than 4 meters long, had likely suffered exhaustion after being unable to feed. Officials said they had also discovered a bullet lodged in the base of its skull, though it was far from clear that the wound played a role in its death.
