The intervention, which took place Tuesday August 9, did not save the cetacean stuck for more than a week in the Seine. The scope of the human and financial resources mobilized questions certain scientists.
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Tuesday August 9, around 10 p.m., more than 80 people mobilized to extract a beluga from the Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne lock (Eure), in the Seine, a hundred kilometers from the capital , and move it to a salt water pool in Ouistreham, in Calvados. Twenty-four divers took turns to attract the cetacean in nets before the animal was ultimately captured, at 4 am.
“Despite the technical and logistical means implemented, the state of the cetacean unfortunately deteriorated during the trip,” the Calvados prefecture said in a statement, which said that “the decision was therefore taken Collegially, with veterinarians, euthanize “. First exams were carried out and made it possible to understand that the white whale was elderly and that it “no longer had digestive mobility”, explains Florence Ollivet-Courtois, veterinarian of the departmental fire and rescue service.
On August 2, the presence of beluga was reported by a video taken at Vatteport, in Eure. The animal is then dangerously closer to Paris before being blocked in the lock. Its presence in the fresh and warm waters of the Seine hinders a little more every day the chances of survival of the animal, accustomed to the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean. Especially since the vitamins administered to open their appetite produces only few effects. The state of this 800 kilograms cetacean is deemed concerned about the veterinarians, even if it “swam with vigor”, nuance Antoine Derieux, director of the French Biodiversity Office of Normandy. The option of euthanizing the beluga is excluded and it is decided to carry out a rescue operation, in vain.
large financial and human means
The resurgence of this type of incident questions. In May, an orca had already tried to go up the Seine for several days before dying, while in 2018, a beluga had remained three months in the Thames estuary, in England, before disappearing. “There seems to be an increase in these cases of animals outside the sectors,” observes Stéphane Lair, director of the Quebec center on the health of wild animals. The scientist believes that this phenomenon could simply come from an “increase in populations, as we have seen with the humpback whales”. The second reason put forward by the expert is that “places of residential are increasingly degraded, these migratory behaviors suggest issues in access to resources”.
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