The beluga spotted on Tuesday in the Seine, a river in northern France, was in a stationary state on Monday morning, we learned from the ocean defense NGO Sea Shepherd.
The beluga whale spotted in the Seine on Tuesday was in a stationary state on Monday morning, AFP learned from the ocean defense NGO Sea Shepherd. We do not observe “no deterioration in his condition. He remains alert but still does not eat”, indicated to AFP the president of Sea Sheperd France, Lamya Essemlali. The four-meter-long cetacean, accustomed to cold waters and whose presence in this river is exceptional, is still in a lock 70 kilometers northwest of Paris.
Several attempts to feed the animal, “very thin” according to the local prefecture, have been made in recent days but without success so far, day by day reducing its chances of survival. In addition, a prolonged stay in the water of the lock, which is warm and stagnant compared to its usual aquatic environment, is detrimental to its state of health. Among the conceivable hypotheses are an extraction or opening of the lock with the hope that he will return to the English Channel.
In May, an orca found itself in difficulty in the Seine. The operations to try to save the cetacean failed and the animal finally died of starvation. According to the Pelagis observatory, which specializes in marine mammals, the beluga “has an arctic and subarctic distribution. Although the best known population is found in the estuary of the St. in Svalbard”, an archipelago located in the north of Norway, 3,000 kilometers from the Seine. According to the same source, this is the second beluga known in France after a fisherman from the Loire estuary had brought one up in his nets in 1948. In 1966, another individual had gone up the Rhine, in the east to Germany and in 2018 a beluga whale was sighted in the Thames Estuary in England.