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“There is no point in carrying an animal that is too weak to swim out into deeper water. It’s like throwing a bird that has hit the windscreen into the air and hoping it will fly again. Then the bird dies somewhere else, just not on my doorstep. That’s torture for this animal.” That’s what Lisa Klemens from the German Oceanographic Museum in Stralsund says in an interview with the leading German daily SZ.
Her colleague, marine biologist Anja Gallus, also takes a critical view of the way the humpback whale, affectionately known to humans and the media as “Timmy”, is treated. For the researchers, he has no name: “The whale is a wild animal, not a pet with which you can build up a loving relationship. That doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings for this animal. We try to help him as best we can. That’s why we went into science.”
However, Lisa Klemens, who is preparing for the autopsy of the weakened animal and is being insulted and threatened on the internet, finds herself calling the whale “Timmy”.
What sounds could mobilise Timmy the whale?
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s Environment Minister Till Backhaus believes that there is no longer any realistic hope of saving the humpback whale.
However, Timmy recently made some unusual noises on Saturday night. As reported by German public broadcaster NDR (source in German), the scientific team is now investigating whether it makes sense to play the whale recordings of its own songs under water. According to the minister, this is a “minimally invasive attempt to mobilise the whale”.
Marine biologist Klemens speaks of the whale “growling”. She “almost felt scolded” when the animal growled at the end of March because the experts had travelled close to it in a boat.
In response to the crossfire of criticism, the Ministry of the Environment in Schwerin has now published the report on the assessment of the stranded humpback whale off the island of Poel (source in German) on the internet. However, the researchers from the German Oceanographic Museum point out how unfounded the accusations often are when people – “holding a megaphone in one hand and a fish sandwich in the other” – protest.
How long will it take for Timmy to die?
Nobody can say how long it will take for the stranded humpback whale to die. Marine biologist Gallus explains: “It sounds harsh, but we may have to wait until the whale has starved to death, and that can take time. Whales don’t eat for six months. Although it has just come from a region where it has eaten little, it is not completely emaciated.” The researchers admit that this may seem cruel.
Over the past few weeks, Timmy has repeatedly behaved differently than a humpback whale would normally do, namely swim out into the open sea. The apparently injured animal has repeatedly returned to the shallow waters near the coast.
The danger of gillnets in the Baltic Sea
The marine biologists from Stralsund assume that Timmy got caught in a gillnet, in which harbour porpoises native to the Baltic Sea often perish in agony.
Environmental protection organisations such as Greenpeace criticise the up to 15-metre-high and up to 15-kilometre-long nylon net walls because of the enormous quantities of so-called bycatch: ducks and other sea birds, but also marine mammals that cannot locate the thin nets, get caught in them and die.
Lisa Klemens explains that although many people are interested in Timmy’s fate and hope for a happy ending, many important problems go unnoticed: “Set nets are a great danger, the animals die a cruel, man-made death in them. But nobody is interested in that, we don’t get that much attention.”