Take, for instance, the beluga's icy home in the Arctic. Whereas belugas are calmer."Įvolution likely plays a role in the beluga's temperament. "Maybe because dolphins are like a 3-year-old child - they don't have a very long attention span, they are temperamental. Naval sources from different countries have said that "beluga whales were far easier to train than dolphins," Béland said. That said, it's no wonder that colder-climate countries such as Russia continue to train belugas. While the Navy has animal training facilities in California and Hawaii, both places are too warm for the Arctic animal, he said. Navy doesn't appear to use beluga whales anymore it's not clear why, but one reason could be water temperature. Navy has studied beluga whales, though with the purpose of learning how the animal's sonar could help scientists improve the sonar on submarines, Béland said. But, once again, the Russians returned and collected the mammal, "and I never saw it again," Béland said. By this time, the whale had quite a fan base in Turkey. A year later, the whale escaped to Turkish waters again. But the Russians found out they parked their ship within international waters and someone, presumably the whale's trainer, was able to call the whale back. "We surmised they had filed its teeth so it could take a big object in its mouth, such as a magnetic mine that it could stick on the hull of a foreign ship for military purposes."īéland later learned that a storm had ripped a net at this naval facility, allowing the beluga whale to escape. "It turned out was coming from a naval facility on the Russian side in the Crimea," Béland said. He also noticed something curious: The whale's teeth had been filed down flat. "It was tame, it would come to us and you could give him fish and pat him on the head," Béland recalled. These animals live in the Arctic and aren't typically found in warmer waters.īéland flew to Turkey, where he saw the whale with his own eyes, swimming off the country's northern coast. "I said, 'No, not at all,'" Béland told Live Science. In the mid-1990s, Béland got a call from government officials in Turkey, asking if it was normal for a beluga whale to be in the Black Sea. This isn't the first case of a Russian-trained beluga going AWOL. He said that he hoped the whale would be able to hunt for food on its own, but that's still unclear at this point, Rikardsen said. The animal probably approached the fishermen's boat because the animal was used to people feeding it fishy treats, Rikardsen noted. Rikardsen added that as far as he knows, neither Norweigan nor Russian researchers put harnesses on belugas, which suggests that this was likely the handiwork of the Russian navy in Murmansk, a city in northwestern Russia, he said.
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