a lifeless humpback whale found stranded off the coast of Réville

It is a sad discovery made on the Normandy coast. Off the coast of Réville, in the Val de Saire in the Manche, a humpback whale 7 to 10 meters long and weighing approximately 10 to 12 tons according to the maritime prefecture, ran aground this Sunday, November 10, reports France Bleu . The lifeless cetacean was drifting when the coastguards intervened under the gaze of dozens of curious people who came to witness the operations.

The town's mayor, Yves Asseline, told our colleagues from France Bleu Cotentin that he was warned “by the firefighters and the police shortly before 10 a.m.”. “We have already had dolphins stranded on our coasts, seals, but to my knowledge never a whale,” he specifies, stressing that the presence of this whale had been widely relayed on social networks this weekend. extended end of November 11.

The whale extracted from the English Channel to avoid “any health risk”

The cetacean was taken into care by the gendarmes at the end of the day, then loaded into a truck to be autopsied and analyzed, explains the Manche prefecture. These analyzes must shed light on the circumstances of the death of this whale, and make it possible to “remove any health risk linked to the consequences of its stranding near the coast”. The animal was indeed “full of gas” when it arrived, says the mayor of Réville.

How can we explain the presence of this whale near our coasts? Gérard Mauger, the president of the Cotentin cetacean study group, still explains to our colleagues from France Bleu that “the numbers of humpback whales have been increasing in number for 40 years after having been greatly decimated by episodes of hunting They migrate to tropical waters in winter to give birth and it is during this migration that they can pass near our coasts.

On BFM Normandie, Marc Giraud, spokesperson for the association for the protection of wild animals, put forward several hypotheses, including potential collisions with large boats, underwater noise pollution and even chemical pollution. Last October, another humpback whale was seen alive and swimming in the Seine.