Hopes are slim but remain this Sunday, August 7. The option of euthanizing the beluga, which has been in the Seine for several days, has been “discarded for the moment”, Lamya Essemlali, head of Sea Shepherd, the ocean defense NGO, told AFP. when the cetacean is sick and does not feed.
“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.
slim hopes
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, a disease. He is undernourished and it is several weeks, even several months. At sea, he no longer ate,” Ms Essemlali continued.
The presence of spots on his body, revealed on Saturday, would come from the fact that he is in fresh water. Asked about the chances of saving the animal, Ms. Essemlali said that the experts and the authorities were faced with “a challenge”, where there is “little hope”. “We are all dubious about its ability to reach the sea by its own means. Even if we + drove + it with a boat, it would be extremely perilous, if not impossible, ”she confided.
An extraction in sight?
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, to 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 warm.
“He must be out within the next 24/48 hours, these are not optimal conditions for him,” explained the Sea Shepherd manager. 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. Lawrence (Quebec), the closest to our coasts is found in Svalbard, an archipelago located in the north of Norway (3,000 km from the Seine)”.