She lost her flipper after colliding with a ship, and since then, she's been hugging the Mediterranean coast, unable to feed herself properly. Terribly thin, Fluker the whale is now at the end of her life…
Footage by Alexis Rosenfeld Photographe and WWF-France
Footage by Alexis Rosenfeld Photographe and WWF-France
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
00:00She's kind of the ambassador of what we make these animals go through and so I'm very sad to see her end her life like that.
01:00Last year, in August, we found Fluker with her totally amputated caudal fin and this time probably after that, a splice in a fishing gear.
01:23We thought she was going to die quickly and then against all odds, Fluker was reported a little over a month ago in Greece and for a month now everyone has been following her since she has been sailing along the coast.
01:35She has been surviving, I would even say in agony, for more than a year living on these reserves.
01:48When you see her, you can see that she has no way of going to feed like the common herons do, i.e. by diving a few hundred meters, there is nothing left to feed on the pockets of herons, which are their almost exclusive food.
02:02She is terribly thin, there is only water and skin left on her, she breathes very difficultly, so we are at the end of her life and it is quite sad to see that because she was a celebrity in the Mediterranean.
02:32Fluker illustrates quite perfectly what the caudal fins must endure from our activities, that is to say, on the one hand the risk of collisions, which I mentioned, which is the first natural cause of death,
02:56and then on the other hand all the risks that are related to these fishing equipment or these goods that end up in the sea in which they end up.
03:04Another threat that we are talking about more and more and which is also very important is that of plastics.
03:09Add to this a contamination because we did biopsies of this animal and we discovered that it was contaminated by PCBs, by derivatives of DDT, by organofluoride products, i.e. agricultural phytosanitary products.
03:23By keeping in mind that PCBs and DDTs are products that have been banned for 40 and 50 years and that we still find in the common area today.
03:33So that means that all the new products that we are releasing today will be found in the common areas here in the 50s.
03:40So she is a beautiful illustration of what we make our co-locators on planet Earth suffer.