After a week of intensive rescue work, authorities on Germany’s Baltic coast have set up a restricted zone around a humpback whale stranded near the island of Poel so the animal can “die in peace.”
“We did everything we could to give it a chance,” said Till Backhaus, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s environment minister, adding that officials had exhausted options. The whale first became beached at Timmendorf Beach on March 23 and later became stuck again in Wismar Bay.
At a press conference Backhaus said officials had “explored all ideas” and would make no further attempts to free the animal. Rescuers report the whale is lying in shallow water, breathing weakly and irregularly and barely moving.
Rescue expert Burkard Baschek said all measures had been tried and the animal’s prospects were negligible. He warned that forcing it to move would require vigorous stimulation that the whale no longer had the strength for and could amount to animal cruelty. Out of respect for nature, he said, rescuers had decided to let the animal be.
The young male humpback, believed to be a North Atlantic individual about 12–15 meters (39–49 feet) long, has been roaming the Baltic Sea for roughly four weeks. It first ran aground on a sandbank off Schleswig-Holstein and was freed with excavators and dredgers, but it later grounded again. On Monday rescuers briefly guided it away using acoustic stimuli, only for it to strand anew the next afternoon.
German media have nicknamed the whale “Timmy.” Rescuers say it suffers severe skin problems linked to the Baltic’s low salinity and still has traces of fishing nets in its mouth that were only partly removed. The Baltic offers limited feeding opportunities, although humpbacks can survive long periods without food.
Authorities said the animal had been breathing and moving but had not changed position; they initially left it time to recover, but by Tuesday evening its condition had worsened and its reaction to human presence was “virtually zero,” Baschek said.
If the whale dies, its carcass will be taken to the German Oceanographic Museum for investigation into the cause of death.
Edited by Alex Berry