Stranded miles and miles aside from home , things were n’t appear too good for this lost juvenile narwhal . Fortunately , the wandering kid is doing just all right thanks to his new pal , a local gang of beluga whales .
The improbable cod was spotted in the waters of the St Lawrence River near the province of Quebec by theGroup for Research and Education on Marine Mammals(GREMM ) back in July .
Each year , GREMM research worker head to the river and its estuary to count and photo - ID the seedpod of beluga whale . Much to their surprisal , they note a unusual plus to the gang : a immature Monodon monoceros , some 1,000 kilometers ( 620 miles ) in the south of its usual Arctic range . By all appearance , the lost narwhale has been espouse by the belugas , gayly living alongside them , despite their obvious differences .
you’re able to spot the narwhal in the image above thanks to its flecked gray coloring and its long single ivory .
" It act like it was one of the boy , " Robert Michaud , GREMM ’s president and scientific director , toldCBC News .
It ’s actually quite surprising that beluga whales , let alone narwhals , are in St Lawrence River as they are primarily found in icy Arctic pee . The 120 - or - so belugas that populate in the area are an isolated universe that do n’t tend to transmigrate as far as others .
" I do n’t think it should storm people , " added Martin Nweeia , a research worker and narwhal expert at Harvard University . " I think it shows … the compassion and the receptiveness of other species to welcome another penis that may not await or act the same . And maybe that ’s a good deterrent example for everyone . "
Even though these two species might bet rather different , they are in reality the only two member of the cetacean family line Monodontidae . They ’re both extremely sociable marine mammals , although narwhals tend to hang out in thick ocean that are cross in a layer of thickheaded ice .
“ Due to the clime change being watch over in the Arctic , there is a chance that these two related species … might find themselves in one another ’s company more and more often in the decades to amount , ” GREMM said in ablog post .
“ We already see this phenomenon in other species such as the polar bear and the silver-tip , which have even been observed to interbreed . ”
There is also batch of grounds to suggest that they ’ve had close run - ins with each other before . In 1993,a scientific studydocumented the skull of an ostensible cross between a narwhal and a beluga whale , although DNA examination was never carried out to confirm this theory .
