Hopes of rescuing a malnourished beluga whale that swam up the Seine plummeted on Sunday, but rescuers said they had ruled out “euthanasia” for now.
The whale was first sighted on Tuesday in the river that flows through Paris to the English Channel. Since Friday it has been between two locks around 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 needs to be moved in the next 24 to 48 hours, these conditions are not good for him,” Lamya Essemlali, director of Sea Shepherd France, told AFP.
Specialists gave “little hope” for the visibly underweight whale, Essemlali said.
“We all doubt his own ability to return to the sea,” she said. “Even if we ‘ride’ it in a boat, that would be extremely dangerous, if not impossible.”
However, “the euthanasia option is ruled out for now because it would be premature at this point,” she said.
The whale still has “energy…turns its head, responds to stimuli,” she said after a meeting of experts and French officials.
Although rescuers tried to feed him frozen herring and then live trout, the animal refused the food.
“His lack of appetite is certainly a symptom of something else…an illness. He is malnourished and that was weeks if not months ago. He stopped eating at sea,” Essemlali said.
Small blemishes reported Saturday on his pale skin are likely due to the fresh water, Sea Shepherd said.
Another option considered would be to take it out of the water, give it vitamins, check the cause of the disease and ship it out to sea to be fed.
– Rare sighting –
Belugas are typically found only in cold arctic waters, and although they migrate south in the fall to forage as ice molds, they rarely venture that far.
An adult can grow up to four meters long.
According to the French Pelagis Observatory, which specializes in marine mammals, the closest beluga population is off the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway, 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles) from the Seine.
It is only the second documented sighting of a belugas in a French river since 1948, when a fisherman found one in his nets in the Loire Estuary.
The sighting comes just months after a killer whale – also known as an orca but technically part of the dolphin family – was stranded in the Seine River and later found dead between Le Havre and Rouen in late May.
An autopsy revealed the animal, which measured more than four meters in length, was likely exhausted after being unable to feed itself.
Officials said they also discovered a bullet lodged in the base of his skull – although it was far from clear that the wound played a role in his death.
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