A gaggle of rich Germans have pooled funds in a last-ditch effort to avoid wasting a stranded humpback whale off the country’s northern coast.
The 12-tonne mammal, which has been nicknamed “Timmy” by several local media outlets, was first spotted within the Baltic Sea near Timmendorfer Strand, removed from its natural habitat, in early March and has been stuck in shallow waters ever since.
Since his first sighting, Timmy has been trapped several times in various locations and freed with human assistance, but has turn into stranded again and is now fighting for his life, rescuers say.
“It’s weakened, and its possibilities of survival are slim,” Sea Shepherd Germany, a marine conservation company, said.
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There have been plans to try to softly nudge the whale off the seafloor using a tarp and a tugboat, in line with BBC reports, but experts have warned this approach could injure the already weakened creature.
A secondary mission, which is able to use air cushions to drift the whale back to the surface so it may well be pulled into deeper waters and back towards the Atlantic, is being funded by two multimillionaires who improved to back the Eleventh-hour rescue mission, The Guardian reported.
Certainly one of the donors is Walter Gunz, the founding father of an electronics retailer chain, who told the German news agency dpa that if rescuers don’t act now, the whale would die. “No less than in the event you try something, you will have a probability of saving it,” he said.
German outlets have been streaming live footage of Timmy’s ongoing rescue efforts, including what has been dubbed “Operation Cushion,” which began when a gaggle of rescuers paddled out to the whale to try to remove the silt trapping his flippers. The plan is to then slide inflatable pads under Timmy to lift him onto a tarp attached to a tugboat.
State officials have approved the private initiative to move the whale back to the North Sea and, possibly, farther to the Atlantic. If every little thing goes in line with plan, the tugboat carrying Timmy could have left the Baltic Sea by Friday.
“He’s not lively, and he’s definitely not agile, but he shows that there’s still life in him,” Till Backhaus, the environment minister of the state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania, where Wismar is positioned, said Wednesday as he announced the brand new rescue plan. “He’s definitely suffered serious damage, that’s needless to say.”
The whale reportedly swam into the Baltic Sea last month searching for food and has several wounds on its back, the British news outlet reported.
Online newspapers have pushed alerts with the smallest developments about Timmy’s health, including updates on its bad skin condition, which is expounded to the Baltic Sea’s low salt content.
The international environmental group Greenpeace criticized the rescue efforts, saying in a press release, “We at the moment are focusing our efforts on promoting the protection of the oceans, including as a habitat for whales,” before adding that the animal’s possibilities of survival were extremely low and that the present mission posed a high risk of injury to the mammal.
A 67-year-old woman jumped off a ship over the weekend to get near the whale before she was stopped, the Associated Press reported.
— With files from the Associated Press
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