According to the analysis report made public on Wednesday, the mammal had a bullet housed at the base of the skull, but presented no other lesion. For the NGO Sea Shepherd, which intends to file a complaint, the shots against cetaceans are not isolated cases.
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The juvenile orca, found dead in the Seine on May 30, did not give all its secrets. According to the results of the necropsy practiced on the cetacean, made public on Wednesday July 6 by the prefecture of Seine-Maritime, the analyzes highlighted the presence of a bullet at the base of the skull of the cetacean. However, this ammunition would not be the cause of his death, the investigators favoring the track of a great state of weakness. “At this stage, the first results of the analyzes lead to favor the hypothesis that the animal died of inanition (state of weakness caused by the fact that the animal has ceased to eat), without the Origin cannot be known with certainty, written the prefecture in its press release. (…) If the exact cause of the death is not known, the elements collected indicate that his death is not directly linked to his passage in the Seine . “
The first observations of the animal, made in particular by the experts of the Pelagis Observatory of La Rochelle and the University of Liège, had immediately put on the track of an abnormal thinness. “It is often believed that cetaceans do not have a neck, but if they have a neck, which disappears in the fatty mass, specifies Thierry Jauniaux, veterinarian and specialist in the strandings of marine mammals, which participated in the work of necropsy. Now on this orca, we saw the neck, so it meant that it had lost its fat mass. “
This juvenile female, measuring 4.26 meters per 1,100 kilograms, had in her pre-estomac only a few claws and vibches (mustaches) of a seal, a sign that she had not been nourished for a long time. “We cannot date precisely when when her last meal goes up, but she hadn’t eaten anything for several days, several weeks, or even more,” continues the professor of the University of Liège.
l ‘Impact could not be dated
The presence of the projectile in its head is one more enigma. It was Eric Pellé, an osteology preparer of the National Museum of Natural History, who discovered the ball, several days after the first samples, when he cleaned the animal’s carcass flesh in his workshop in Paris. The skeleton will indeed join the collection of marine mammals of the museum, and is the subject of a cleaning and inventory of the skeleton.
“During the first analyzes, on May 31, the head was meticulously examined and dissected, to several experts, and we have not seen anything, reports Thierry Jauniaux. In the place where the ball has stayed, There is a thin layer of fabric and we arrive very quickly on the animal’s skull. If the ball had arrived at full power, it would have struck the skull, but it presented no lesion, no more than observed hematoma or trauma. “For the veterinarian, it is likely that the water has amortized the shock before the ball came to stay in the head of the orca. The impact could not be dated to date, a ballistic survey being necessary to better understand it.
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