Endangered whale washes ashore in Tunisia
Nine-tonne mammal died after becoming entangled in a fishing net near the tourist town of Sidi Bou Said.
The carcass of a nine-tonne fin whale has been discovered off the coast of Tunis, a rare find in the Mediterranean.
The 12.8-metre mammal was caught in a fishing net on Sunday near the coastal tourist town of Sidi Bou Said and then brought ashore, surprising local residents and marine scientists.
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“It was found next to the Presidential Palace in Carthage,” Mohamed Abdel Mounem Belhassen, the 43-year-old fisherman who found the whale, told Al Jazeera on Monday.
He discovered the whale in eight to nine metres of water about a kilometre from the beach after it became entangled in a fishing net, preventing it from resurfacing to breathe.
Belhassen brought other boats and eventually rented a truck to help move the whale to shore, a process that took about 12 hours.
A small section of the young mammal was removed for analysis, while the rest was to be buried in a pit in the nearby town of Raoued, according to a National Guard official.
The skeleton would eventually be displayed at a marine wildlife museum, said Sami Mahmani, president of Houtiyat, a Tunisian marine mammal protection organisation.
The second largest mammal in the world, the fin whale is an endangered species.
Although Sunday’s find was unusual, Mohamed Ali Ben Temessek, a Tunisian marine biology specialist, told Al Jazeera that the beaching of marine mammals “is becoming more and more frequent on the Tunisian coast.”
In February 2012, a 12-metre, 15-tonne sperm whale washed ashore on Sidi Daoud beach in Tunisia. Two years earlier, a grey whale appeared off the coast of Israel, shocking scientists who believed the North Atlantic population of the species was extinct.