A beluga whale was discovered with a harness around its body that apparently was Russian-made, sparking alarm from Norwegian officials that the animal escaped a military facility in Russia, according to reports on April 29.
He said the beluga is “most likely” from the “Russian Navy in Murmansk.”
The whale was approaching boats and trying to rub off the straps, according to the publication. A fisherman then went into the water and took off the harness.
Wiig said the whale exhibited behavior that suggested it had been in captivity for a while.
“It was very used to people, so I do not know if it will manage alone,” Wiig said, according to New Scientist.
“The question is now whether it can survive by finding food by itself. We have seen cases where other whales that have been in Russian captivity doing fine,” he said.
Col. Viktor Baranets, a Russian reserve colonel, said that it could have escaped from the Russian navy.
“We have military dolphins for combat roles, we don’t cover that up,” he told the BBC. “In Sevastopol (in Crimea) we have a center for military dolphins, trained to solve various tasks, from analyzing the seabed to protecting a stretch of water, killing foreign divers, attaching mines to the hulls of foreign ships.”
The Soviet Union used a base in Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula during the Cold War to train the mammals for military purposes such as searching for mines or other objects and planting explosives. The facility in Crimea was closed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, though unnamed reports shortly after the Russian annexation of Crimea indicated that it had reopened.
The Russian Defense Ministry published a public tender in 2016 to purchase five dolphins for a training program. The tender did not explain what tasks the dolphins were supposed to perform but indicated they were supposed to have good teeth. It was taken offline shortly after publication.