Off-course whale disappears in Amazonian river

An 18-foot-long minke whale that ran aground on a sandbar in the Amazon jungle got dislodged and disappeared in the Tapajos River, some 1,000 miles from the ocean, Brazilian media reported today.

Brazil’s Environmental Protection Agency, known as Ibama, called off its search for the whale late on Friday after trying to find the mammal by helicopter with the help of local residents in boats, the O Globo newspaper reported.

Ibama officials were not available to confirm the report because the agency was closed on Friday and Saturday for a long holiday weekend.

The whale ran aground on Wednesday near Santarem, a city in the Amazon rain forest, Ibama said Friday.

The Globo TV network broadcast images of dozens of people gathered along the Tapajos River splashing water on the animal, whose back and dorsal fin were out of water and exposed to the hot Amazon sun.

Biologist Fabio Luna said that the 12-ton whale apparently lost its way, entered the Amazon and swam upstream, which she called a “very strange and adverse situation.”

The minke whale is the second smallest of the baleen whales after the pygmy right whale. The International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee estimates there are about 184,000 minke whales in the central and north-east Atlantic Ocean.