A whale in a harness spotted by fishermen off Norway‘s northern coast might have escaped from a Russian military facility, according to marine experts.
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The beluga whale, which had a harness tied around its body either side of its pectoral fins, had last week been harassing fisherman, who then contacted Norway’s Directorate of Fisheries, according to a report in The Guardian.
Directorate of Fisheries workers Jørgen Ree Wiig and Yngve Larsen were able to remove the harness using a custom-made tool usually employed to free whales from fishing lines.
Other than the fact that a whale wearing a seemingly purpose-built harness is already in itself quite suspicious, it was made even more so by the fact that one of the clips on the harness was marked ‘Equipment of St Petersburg’:
Photo: Jørgen Ree Wiig.
Wiig told CNN that it appeared that the harness has mounts specifically for GoPros on either side and that the Russian navy had been known to use beluga whales for military operations before, citing “guarding naval bases, helping divers, [and] finding lost equipment” as examples.
Professor Audun Rikardsen from the department of arctic and marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway told Norwegian news service NRK that he had contacted Russian researchers he knew to see if the whale had something to do with them, but that they said it was most likely to do with the Russian navy in Murmansk.
Marine mammal researcher Martin Biuw from the Institute of Marine Research told CNN that the animal definitely appeared trained, and that that training wouldn’t be undertaken by anyone in Norway or Greenland, as researchers do not use harnesses. He added that any guesses as to the whale’s provenance would be “pure speculation“, but did say that Russia has a history of using whales for military purposes.
A 2017 report by the Siberian Times said that the Murmansk Sea Biology Research Institute had been training beluga whales for use by Russia’s Northern Navy.
