A beluga whale that strayed into the River Seine and began swimming in the direction of Paris has died during an ambitious rescue effort intended to help it back to its traditional cold Arctic waters.
The four-metre animal was euthanised by vets after it developed breathing difficulties while being transferred by road to the Normandy coast. Hours earlier, it had been lifted out of the freshwater of the Seine, where it could not survive.
“Despite an unprecedented rescue operation for the beluga, we are sad to announce the death of the cetacean,” the prefect of the Calvados department tweeted.
“During the journey, the veterinarians confirmed a worsening of its state, notably its respiratory activities, and at the same time noticed the animal was in pain, not breathing enough,” Florence Ollivet Courtois, a French wild animal expert, told Associated Press.
“The suffering was obvious for the animal, so it was important to release its tension, and so we had to proceed to euthanise it.”
Courtois said the whale experienced distress after it was moved to a refrigerated truck and during the approximately 99-mile (160km) drive to the Normandy coast.
The conservation group Sea Shepherd France said veterinary exams after the beluga’s removal from the river showed it had no digestive activity. Members of the organisation had tried unsuccessfully since Friday to feed fish to the whale.
The four-metre (13-ft), underweight whale was spotted more than a week ago heading towards Paris and was stranded 80 miles inland from the Channel at Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne in Normandy.
Since Friday, the animal’s movement inland had been blocked by a lock 43 miles north-west of Paris and its health had deteriorated after it refused to eat.
Early on Wednesday morning, the 800kg whale was lifted from the water by net in the first stage of an ambitious rescue operation. More than 20 divers were involved in the operation and the rescuers handling the ropes had to try several times between 10pm and 4am to lure the animal into the nets to be lifted out of the water. It was placed on a barge under the immediate care of a dozen veterinarians.
It was then moved to a refrigerated truck to transport it to the coast. A seawater basin at a lock in the Channel port of Ouistreham was prepared for the whale, which was to spend three days under observation in preparation for its release.
But during its journey to the coast, it developed breathing difficulties and was put down.
“The decision to euthanise the beluga was taken as it was too weakened to be put back into water,” Guillaume Lericolais, the sub-prefect of France’s Calvados region, said.
Officials had warned of the animal’s poor health when it was pulled out of the Seine on Wednesday morning.
“The veterinarians are not necessarily optimistic,” Isabelle Dorliat-Pouzet, a senior official from the Eure prefecture, had told BFM TV when the animal was lifted from the Seine. “It’s horribly thin for a beluga and that does not bode well for its life expectancy in the medium term.”
In late May, a gravely ill orca swam dozens of miles up the Seine and died of natural causes after attempts to guide it back to sea failed.
In September 2018, a beluga was spotted in the River Thames, east of London, in what was then the most southerly sighting of a beluga on British shores.
Beluga whales typically live in pods in Arctic waters.
