The story of a whale found dead in the port of Sorrento and one of its cubs are exciting and questioning the scientific community.
It could have been the latter, disoriented and hungry, who was filmed in a video as he wiggled violently banging his head against the Marina Grande quay of the famous tourist resort, only to lose his tracks.
But the presence of the baby is only a hypothesis and the yellow remains.
The video, shot with a mobile phone by Francesco Pane known as 'Il Capitano', a long-time waiter of one of the most famous bars in Sorrento, then went viral on social media.
Meanwhile, the carcass of the whale has risen to the surface.
On the spot the men of the Coast Guard.
The Punta Campanella Marine Park was also present and launched the news through its social channels.
"The hypothesis that the whale found dead is the mother of the baby identified and captured in the viral video is more than founded, which would also explain the animal's disorientation - says cetologist
Barbara Mussi
, president of
Oceanomare Delphis
, who has These days a winter monitoring campaign of cetaceans has started in the Gulf of Naples with the support of the marine protected area of the Kingdom of Neptune of Ischia and Procida -. We know - he adds - that fin whales frequent this area, even going under the coast. death, we await the autopsy examinations, hoping that the state of decomposition of the animal will allow the necessary investigations ".
The confirmation that there was also a smaller specimen of whale in the port of Sorrento also came with an official note from the
Coast Guard of the Castellammare di Stabia command
.
"The images taken by the dive operators of the Coast Guard - reads the note - do not seem compatible with the specimen sighted on the surface the previous day which probably referred to a younger specimen, compared to the one found lifeless on the seabed of the port ".
"The one found dead in the seabed of the port of Sorrento, about 15 meters deep, is a
fin
whale" reports
Sandro Mazzariol of the University of Padov
a, referent of the
Cert
(Cetacean stranding Emergency Response Team) which represents the central coordination recognized to ministerial level in cases of intervention on large cetaceans.
"Now the local authorities - explains Mazzariol - are trying to understand how to manage the carcass for a possible and desirable autopsy examination that will be able to ascertain the causes of death. But it is not easy: the mammal weighs around 35-38 quintals".
The expert then comments on the images of the video in which you can see, again in the port of Sorrento, a whale wriggling under the astonished eyes of passers-by.
"I had already observed behavior in other similar events in which some specimens have slipped into caves or ports.
In those cases, the cause of this wriggling could be attributable to a measles-like virus that affects these large mammals
and which, in the Mediterranean, has been circulating since the late 1980s. It is a problem that affects all 8 species of cetaceans in the Mediterranean and that has created serious problems especially for sperm whales in 2019: in a few months, between May and July in the Mediterranean (where a thousand of these specimens live) 26 died from the virus ".
In the event that, which Professor Mazzariol tends to exclude, the one in the video was the baby of the whale found dead, his convulsive behavior could have been dictated by disorientation and difficulty in feeding.
"It is a sad event that touched the whole local community -
says the president of the Punta Campanella marine protected area, Lucio Cacace
-. This shows how environmental sensitivity is growing. But it is, unfortunately, a natural event and very often there is There is little to do. Luckily, cetaceans are present in our sea. We must try to protect them and make their habitat as clean and healthy as possible. With LifeDelfi, a project coordinated by Cnr Irbim and financed by the European Commission, we try to do so for the dolphins ".
(martino.iannone@ansa.it
