Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries Evidence suggests that the Russian Navy has been looking for new ways to leverage what amounts to the original underwater "drone"—militarized cetaceans. Norwegian fishermen discovered a friendly beluga whale in the Barents Sea off the northeast coast of Norway on April 25. Belugas are native to the Barents, so the whale's presence wasn't the surprise—the surprise was that it was fitted with a camera harness with Russian markings. The beluga kept approaching fishing boats and rubbing against them in an apparent effort to remove the harness. After failed attempts to remove the harness themselves, fishermen sent photos to a marine biologist with Norway's Directorate of Fisheries, and they reported that the whale was in distress. A Fisheries boat was in the area and responded, as reported by a Directorate of Fisheries spokesperson on Facebook: The Directorate of Fisheries' oversight boat Rind was in the area and was asked to assist to release the whale for the tight straps. The crew of the Marine Service are trained to free whales from ropes and fishing gear. After a little lure with cod fillets, and with the fisherman Joar Hesten getting into the water wearing a survival suit, the inspectors Jørgen Ree Wiig and Yngve Larsen from the Marine Service and the Horse managed to release the whale… The whale has probably escaped from Russia where it may have been trained to perform different missions such as underwater photography. The harness was reportedly marked with the label "Equipment St. Petersburg" and had an attachment point for a GoPro camera. Audun Rikardsen, a professor at the Norwegian Arctic University in Tromsø (UiT), told Norway's VG that neither Norwegian nor Russian academic researchers put harnesses on whales. "I have been in contact with some Russian researchers," Rikardsen said. "They can confirm that it is nothing they are doing. They tell me that most likely is the Russian Navy in Murmansk." Advertisement Military marine mammals On April 29, Dmitry Glazov, the deputy head of the Beluga program at the AN Severtsov Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, confirmed to Interfax News Service that the Russian military has been working with beluga whales, but he said that it was not known whether the whales could be used for reconnaissance or intelligence operations. The whales were used for security work during the Sochi Olympics, he noted. "There is an institute in St. Petersburg that cooperates with the military in studying animals for applied purposes, and it works in the Cossack Bay on the Black Sea and in Murmansk,” Glazov told Interfax. Smart, social, and highly trainable marine mammals have long been used for a wide variety of research, and the militaries of the world have explored ways of leveraging those characteristics for wartime use at least as far back as the 1960s. A Soviet research program into the use of sea mammals officially ended in 1990, but it apparently lived on long after that. In 2000, the BBC reported that dolphins that had been trained to kill enemy swimmers and attach limpet mines to enemy ships by the Soviet navy had been sold to Iran, along with sea lions, walruses, sea lions, seals, and a beluga whale. Boris Zhurid, a former Soviet submariner who became a dolphin trainer, told the news outlet that four dolphins and the beluga were originally trained by him to attack divers using harpoons mounted on their backs with a harness, or to grab them with their mouths to drag them to the surface for capture. They were also trained as living torpedoes, taught to deliver mines that would explode upon contact with a ship's hull. The training originally took place at a naval base near Vladivostok, but it moved to Crimea in 1991. At some point, Russia resumed where the Soviet Union had left off. The program went public in 2017 when the Russian Defense Ministry's Zvezda television network reported that the Russian Navy was working with a private research institute to train belugas and other marine mammals. According to the Zvezda report, the institute was working to see if whales, seals, and dolphins could be used to "guard entrances to naval bases" and "assist deepwater divers and if necessary kill any strangers who enter their territory." Advertisement Russia is not alone in working to militarize marine mammals. The US Navy's Marine Mammal Program uses trained bottlenose dolphins and sea lions for a variety of search and recovery missions. Dolphins have been trained to search for and mark submerged mines, and sea lions are used to connect lines to retrieve sunken equipment in places where it's infeasible to use a human diver. And according to a backgrounder on the program posted by the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, which oversees the program, "Both dolphins and sea lions also assist security personnel in detecting and apprehending unauthorized swimmers and divers that might attempt to harm the Navy’s people, vessels, or harbor facilities." The Navy insists that unlike in the 1973 movie Day of the Dolphin, marine mammals have never been weaponized. Beluga abuse Russia is in the midst of an entirely different cetacean crisis. A facility called the Center of Adaptation for Marine Mammals near Nakhodka—a city east of Vladivostok on the coast of the Sea of Japan—was found in February to be holding 87 belugas and 10 orcas captured from the wild illegally. The facility, uncovered by Russian police, was dubbed a "whale prison" by activists. The whales there were apparently collected for sale to Chinese aquariums. On April 8, 2019, after pressure from scientists around the world and a direct appeal from French marine researcher Jean-Michel Cousteau, the Russian government agreed to a partnership with Cousteau's Ocean Futures Society and the Whale Sanctuary Project to rehabilitate all 97 whales and release them into the wild. Listing image by Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries<doc-sep>COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- A beluga whale found with a tight harness that appeared to be Russian made has raised the alarm of Norwegian officials and prompted speculation that the animal may have come from a Russian military facility.Joergen Ree Wiig of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries says "Equipment St. Petersburg" is written on the harness strap, which features a mount for an action camera.He said Monday fishermen in Arctic Norway last week reported the tame white cetacean with a tight harness swimming around. On Friday, fisherman Joar Hesten, aided by the Ree Wiig, jumped into the frigid water to remove the harness.Ree Wiig said "people in Norway's military have shown great interest" in the harness.Audun Rikardsen, a professor at the Department of Arctic and Marine Biology at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsoe, northern Norway, believes "it is most likely that Russian Navy in Murmansk" is involved. Russia has major military facilities in and around Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, in the far northwest of Russia.It wasn't immediately clear what the mammal was being trained for, or whether it was supposed to be part of any Russian military activity in the region.Rikardsen said he had checked with scholars in Russia and Norway and said they have not reported any program or experiments using beluga whales. "This is a tame animal that is used to get food served so that is why it has made contacts with the fishermen," he said. "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. "Hesten told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the whale began to rub itself against his boat when he first spotted it.Russia does not have a history of using whales for military purposes but the Soviet Union had a full-fledged training program for dolphins.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.<doc-sep>
Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force. Fishermen in waters near the small Norwegian fishing village of Inga reported last week that a white beluga whale wearing a strange harness had begun to harass their fishing boats. “We were going to put out nets when we saw a whale swimming between the boats,” fisherman Joar Hesten told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. “It came over to us, and as it approached, we saw that it had some sort of harness on it.” The strange behaviour of the whale, which was actively seeking out the vessels and trying to pull straps and ropes from the sides of the boats, as well as the fact it was wearing a tight harness which seemed to be for a camera or weapon, raised suspicions among marine experts that the animal had been given military-grade training by neighbouring Russia. Inside the harness, which has now been removed from the whale, were the words “Equipment of St. Petersburg”. The fisherman said the whale was very tame and seemed used to human beings. “If this whale comes from Russia – and there is great reason to believe it – then it is not Russian scientists, but rather the navy that has done this,” said Martin Biuw of the Institute of Marine Research in Norway. Audun Rikardsen, professor at the department of arctic and marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway (UiT), told NRK: “We know that in Russia they have had domestic whales in captivity and also that some of these have apparently been released. Then they often seek out boats.” He said he had contacted Russian researchers who said the harnessed whale had nothing to do with them. “They tell me that most likely is the Russian navy in Murmansk,” said Rikardsen. In 1980s Soviet Russia, a programme saw dolphins recruited for military training, their razor-sharp vision, stealth and good memory making them them effective underwater tools for detecting weapons. This mammal programme closed in the 1990s. However, a 2017 report by TV Zvezda, a station owned by the defence ministry, revealed that the Russian navy has again been training beluga whales, seals and bottlenose dolphins for military purposes in polar waters. In the past three years, president Vladimir Putin has reopened three former Soviet military bases along its vast Arctic coastline. The recent research and training was done by Murmansk Sea Biology Research Institute in northern Russia on behalf of the navy to see if beluga whales could be used to “guard entrances to naval bases’” in arctic regions, “assist deepwater divers and if necessary kill any strangers who enter their territory”. Dolphins and seals meanwhile were trained to carry tools for divers and detect torpedoes, mines, and other ammunition which has sunk to depths of up to 120 metres. Government public records records show that the defence ministry purchased five bottle-nosed dolphins, aged between three and five, from Moscow’s Utrish Dolphinarium in 2016 at a cost of £18,000. During their research the Murmansk sea biology research institute concluded dolphins and seals were much more suited to the training and arctic climates than the beluga whales. The whales were deemed too sensitive to the cold and did not have the same “high professionalism” of seals, which had a far better memory for remembering oral commands.