14 DAY TRIAL // Some sea creatures can sometimes go upstream on large rivers, like for example the sharks. The bull sharks, a dangerous species for all humans, does it in many tropical areas.
But this took everyone by surprise: an 18-foot (6 m) long and 12 tons heavy minke whale stranded on a sandbar in the Amazon jungle about 1,000 mi (1,600 km) from the ocean, signaled the Brazilian media on Friday.
A large crowd gathered along the Tapajos River splashing water on the huge animal, whose back and dorsal fins felt the hot Amazon sun. The images broadcast by Globo television shocked the scientists, as whales are not known to enter fresh water, and definitely not so deep. "It apparently got separated from its group and swam upstream. It's very unusual," said biologist Fabio Luna in a televised interview from the site.
A team was attempting to bring the sea animal back in the ocean. "The whale ran aground Wednesday near Santarem in Para state," stated Brazil's Environmental Protection Agency said, cited by the Globo newspaper.
Minke whales are the second smallest baleen whale species after the pygmy right whale, reaching a medium length of about 7.4 m (24 feet) and a weigh of 5 tonnes. (but they can reach even up to 10.7 m (35 ft) and weigh 14 tones. The population of minke whales in the central and northeast Atlantic Ocean could be of about 184,000 individuals.
Because of their smaller size, minke whales were not regularly hunted by the large-scale whaling in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, but as large whale became scarcer, Minke whale started to be the main whale catch by 1979, and minke whales are still hunted during the infamous annual Japanese whaling "research" (a cover for commercial hunting) expeditions. In 2006, Japanese whalers killed 505 Antarctic Minke Whales, 262 of which were pregnant females. Iceland too practices this. Norwegian whalers killed 639 individuals of this species in 2005 and 546 in 2006. DNA analysis of whale meat in South Korea revealed they killed 827 minke between 1999 and 2003.
Whale watching sites for minke whales are found in Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and Australia.