WHALE MYSTERY
Is Norway’s beluga a Russian spy or a rogue therapy whale?
On 25 April, a tame beluga whale wearing a harness repeatedly approached Norwegian fishing boats off Ingoya, an Arctic island about 415km (258 miles) from Murmansk, where Russia’s Northern Fleet is based. Belugas are native to Arctic waters. Audun Rikardsen, professor at the department of Arctic and marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, said the harness had a GoPro camera holder (but no camera), with “Equipment St Petersburg” written on the harness buckle. “A Russian colleague said they don’t do such experiments, but she knows the Navy has caught belugas for some years and trained them – most likely it’s related to that,” said Prof Rikardsen. “Belugas, like dolphins and killer whales, are quite intelligent – they are Arctic animals and quite social, they can be trained like a dog”. The harness, which was attached really tightly round its head in front of its pectoral fins, was difficult to remove. “The beluga had come to the boats repeatedly for two or three days, looking for food, with its mouth open,” said Prof Rikardsen. “It’s a challenge now if the whale will adjust to natural food. Also it needs to find a group – if not, it will probably still come up to a boat.”
A Russian reserve colonel, who has written previously about the military use of marine mammals, shrugged off Norway’s concern, but he didn’t deny that it could have escaped from the Russian Navy. Interviewed by Russian broadcaster Govorit
Moskva, Col Viktor Baranets said: “If we were using this animal for spying do you really think we’d attach a mobile phone number with the message ‘please call this number’? We have military dolphins for combat roles, we don’t cover that up. In Sevastopol [in Crimea] we have a centre for military dolphins, trained to solve various tasks, from analysing the seabed to protecting a stretch of water, killing foreign divers, attaching mines to the hulls of foreign ships.” Dolphins’ razorsharp vision, stealth and good memory making them effective underwater tools for detecting weapons.
The dolphin facility in Crimea used to be under Ukrainian control, but was seized by the Russian Navy in 2014, when Russian forces took over the peninsula. Government public records show that the defence ministry purchased five bottlenosed dolphins, aged between three and five, from Moscow’s Utrish Dolphinarium in 2016 at a cost of £18,000. During their research the Murmansk sea biology research institute concluded dolphins and seals were much more suited to the
“Equipment St Petersburg” was written on the buckle harness
training and arctic climates than beluga whales. The whales were deemed too sensitive to the cold and did not have the same “high professionalism” of seals, which had a far better memory for oral commands.
During the Cold War, the US Navy set up a special programme for training dolphins and sea lions in California. The US Navy Marine Mammal Program, based in San Diego, uses bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions for locating mines and other dangerous objects on the ocean floor. The Navy website also says the animals are used to detect unauthorised personnel underwater who could potentially harm US ships. The US Navy deployed dolphins to the Gulf during the Iraq War in 2003 to help mine-clearance teams. In 2015, Hamas captured a dolphin off Gaza and accused Israel of equipping the animal with spying devices.
When no one publicly announced they had lost a “spy whale”, another angle on the story emerged when Morten Vikeby, a former Norwegian consul to the city of Murmansk, said the amiable beluga reminded him of a “therapy whale” he’d seen in 2008 at a diving centre in the Murmansk region. That whale, named Semyon, sometimes entertained tour groups of children with mental disabilities. “Maybe it wasn’t the same whale but it acted the same way,” he said. The likelihood that the Ingoya beluga is Semyon is a long shot. “For the last two and a
half years, there haven’t been any whales here,” said Mikhail Safonov, the head of the Arctic Circle dive centre. He believed the last whale had been sold to the St Petersburg Oceanarium in 2016. He never saw any of them wear harnesses and they “never had tasks or exercises where they would exit the enclosure into the sea”.
The Ingoya beluga has become a local celebrity. Locals have christened him Hvaldimir, a portmanteau of the Norwegian word for whale, hval, and the Russian name Vladimir. A regular in the sea by the harbour city of Hammerfest, he even retrieved Ina Mansika’s cell phone after she dropped it in the water. “I had forgotten to close my jacket pocket and my phone fell in the ocean,” she said. “We assumed it would be gone forever, until the whale dove back down and came back a few moments later with my phone in its mouth!”
Dmitry Glazov, a Russian scientist and deputy head of the beluga white whale programme, said that near Murmansk alone there were “three organisations, not necessarily military, some civilian, that train marine mammals, including belugas, for various tasks: retrieving objects, or finding divers who have had problems, like equipment malfunctions”. Glazov noted that there were reports of plans to use belugas to defend the waters off Sochi during the 2014 Olympics, but he said the presence of a harness alone would not confirm that Hvaldimir has any ties to the Russian military. “These kinds of buckles are sold all across Russia,” he said. BBC News, theguardian.com, 29 April; D.Telegraph, Metro, 30 April; Sun, 8 May; travelandleisure.com, 9 May; Guardian online, 10 May 2019.