Paris, May 25, 2022 – A ‘orca has been sighted in the Seine, a very rare event given that these cetaceans are almost never seen in the Stetto della Manica. The specimen, a male, in fact had already been noticed on April 5, about thirty miles from the French coast by the expert sailors of a fishing boat.
Then the sightings increased, and the coast guard confirmed that the orca was in the area more or less close to the coast. Until the last days when has entered the mouth of the Seineand was spotted near Yainville, over 60 kilometers from the sea.
Gerard Mauger, vice-president and founder of the Groupe d’E’tude des Cetaces du Cotentin (Gecc), as early as last April he explained to the journalists who interviewed him: “It is an exceptional event because it is extremely rare to see these animals in the Channel Sea. Mainly it can happen in Scotland, Iceland, Norway or further south in the Bay of Biscay, but in the Channel there have been very few observations and not all of them confirmed “.
Swim in the Seine for an orca it’s not really healthy, as it would not be for anyone to wallow in the rivers that pass through the big cities, so the health of the cetacean is at the center of the discussion. And there is no shortage of experts in misfortune: “It could be a young man who would have been excluded from a group or that he became isolated due to an illness and he came to calmer waters to feed himself more easily “, was the thought of Delphine Eloi, director of the Gecc.
However, it is not the first time of an orca in fresh water, in fact in October 1931 a specimen was reported in the Columbia River, in the United States, reaching up to a hundred miles inland, and remaining there for almost 100 days, we read in the Larousse Encyclopedia.