A stray beluga whale in the Seine river about 70 km from Paris and who stopped eating will receive vitamins to regain his appetite, the prefecture of Eure, in Normandy, announced on Saturday. “Vitamins will be administered by a veterinarian using an arrow,” Isabelle Dorliat Pouzet, general secretary of the Eure prefecture, said at a press conference on Saturday near the Notre Dame de la Garenne lock.
The beluga, a four-meter cetacean, whose presence in the Seine is exceptional, was still not feeding on Saturday. “She is quite emaciated and appears to be having feeding difficulties,” Pouzet said. The attempts to feed her, with dead herring and live troutThey do not seem to have been successful.
Among the prescriptions to prevent the cetacean from perishing, there is the reopening of a lock towards the sea, 160 km away, so that it can resume its journey or keep it in the basin “so that it recovers its appetite”. Any decision will be made considering the “interest of the animal” and so far none has been made, since analyzes are awaited, the official said.
The animal appeared “small spots” that may be natural due to fresh water, but may also mean that it suffers from other problems, according to the same source. The beluga, which was going back and forth in the basin “calmly” on Saturday, was detected on August 2 in the Seine.
In May, an orca found itself in trouble in the same river, between Rouen and Le Havre. Operations to try to save her failed and the animal starved to death. Dorliat Pouzet states that the situation between the killer whale and the beluga is “very different”, since the whale “was more weakened and had disappeared from radar for some time”.
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They are “two different animals, the orca bears less fresh water than the beluga,” he explained. According to the Pelagis observatory, a specialist in marine mammals, it is the second beluga recorded in France after a fisherman from the Loire estuary caught one of it in his net in 1948.
The beluga is a protected species of cetaceans that usually live in cold waters.