“He must be out within the next 24 to 48 hours, these are not optimal conditions for him,” explained the Sea Shepherd manager.
The option of euthanizing the beluga, which is in the Seine, has been “discarded for the moment”, Lamya Essemlali, head of Sea Shepherd, the ocean defense NGO, told AFP on Sunday. that the cetacean is sick and not feeding.
“The option of euthanasia has been ruled out for the moment because at this stage it would be premature because he still has vigor, a curious behavior: he turns his head, he reacts to stimuli, he does not ‘is not amorphous and moribund,” said Ms. Essemlali, after a meeting with the prefecture, the French Office for Biodiversity, Pelagis and a Canadian cetacean expert.
The beluga, a four-meter cetacean spotted in the Seine on Tuesday and whose presence in this river is exceptional, is in a lock measuring approximately 125 m by 25 m at 70 km northwest of Paris since Friday. “His lack of appetite is surely a symptom of something else, an origin that we do not know, an illness. He is undernourished and it dates back several weeks, even several months. At sea, he no longer ate “, continued Ms. Essemlali. The presence of spots on his body, revealed on Saturday, would come from the fact that he is in fresh water.
Impossible for him to stay in the lock
Asked about the chances of saving the animal, Ms. Essemlali said experts and authorities were faced with “a challenge”, where there is “little hope”. “We are all skeptical about his ability to reach the sea on his own. Even if we ‘drove’ him with a boat, it would be extremely dangerous, if not impossible,” she said.
Another hypothesis would be to extract it from the water and “take it to the sea to feed it and provide it with additional vitamins, do a biopsy to have information on its origin and information on its state of health and what that makes him sick,” she said. In any case, it does not seem possible to leave it in the lock where the water is stagnant and hot. “He must be out within the next 24 to 48 hours, these are not optimal conditions for him,” explained the Sea Shepherd manager.
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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 km from the Seine)”.