A humpback whale found dead this week off a Danish island was identified Saturday as the same animal that had been rescued in Germany two weeks earlier and released toward the North Sea on May 2.
The whale was stranded Thursday just off the small island of Anholt in the Kattegat, the broad strait between Denmark and Sweden that connects the Baltic Sea to the North Sea. Jane Hansen said the stranded humpback whale near Anholt was the same whale previously stranded in Germany and subject to rescue attempts.
A Danish Nature Agency employee retrieved a tracking device still fastened to the whale's back on Saturday, and the position and appearance of the device matched the one that had been attached in German waters. German news agency dpa reported that the number on the device corresponded with the one attached to the whale.
The animal's path had already drawn concern for weeks. It was first spotted off the German coast on March 3, then rescued in late March from shallow water in Timmendorfer Strand with the help of an excavator. The whale soon ran into trouble again nearby, and at the beginning of April experts said they had given up hope for it and expected it to die in the inlet where it was stranded.
Regional authorities in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania later allowed a private rescue initiative to go ahead with an effort to pull the whale onto a flooded barge, and it was moved toward the North Sea before being released on May 2. The final journey covered roughly 45 miles.
The whale's death closed a rescue effort that had become a public spectacle in Germany, with livestreams, protests and arguments over whether more intervention could help or harm the animal. Some scientists said additional rescue attempts would cause severe stress to the ailing and exhausted whale, while others pushed to keep trying.
That tension remained in the background as officials in two countries tried to account for the same animal turning up dead off Denmark after being freed only two weeks earlier. dpa reported that it was not possible to say conclusively what caused the whale's death.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Environment Minister Till Backhaus said the rescue effort had given the whale “a last chance to recover its freedom and health” and that it was important to learn “the best possible lessons” from the episode, adding that acquiescing to the rescue attempt did not amount to criticism of science. For the whale, though, the lesson was final: a desperate effort to save it ended in the open water where Denmark and Germany meet the sea.
