Even before his unexpected voyage, Hvaldimir’s behavior had been changing. Beyond his newfound wanderlust, he became less interested in following boats and hanging around humans compared with previous years. He appeared to be growing wilder all on his own. Because of this evolution, the escalating threat to Hvaldimir’s well-being and the absence of a suitable sanctuary, OneWhale revised its strategy. In partnership with the Norwegian animal rights organization NOAH, OneWhale is now petitioning Norway’s government to relocate Hvaldimir directly to Svalbard, an archipelago about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole, with the nearest resident population of wild belugas. OneWhale hired Jeff Foster to write a detailed report explaining how to transport Hvaldimir by ship or plane. The Norwegian fisheries director, Frank Bakke-Jensen, told me he is open to the idea if OneWhale and its partners can secure the necessary permits and funds.
This tactical shift is one of several recent developments that strained the already fraught alliance between Crosby Haug and her scientific advisers. Moving Hvaldimir to Svalbard may well be his best chance of reuniting with wild belugas, but several experts I interviewed expressed serious concerns about the plan. Beluga societies tend to be highly dynamic and accepting — wild belugas have even adopted lone narwhals — but the Svalbard population is small, insular and nonmigratory. Given Hvaldimir’s mysterious origins and how much time he has spent away from his kin, there’s no guarantee that the Svalbard belugas will welcome him, especially if he was caught in the distant Sea of Okhotsk, where the Russians reportedly acquire many of their military cetaceans. He might also introduce foreign diseases, pathogens or unfavorable genetic mutations.
Moreover, Svalbard’s remoteness and extreme weather make the expedition itself arduous and costly, not to mention stressful and disorienting for a beluga. Even if transport is successful, Hvaldimir would ideally require a period of acclimation on site before release, which would mean obtaining legal authorization to construct a temporary enclosure and maintaining it in potentially harsh conditions. In order to determine Hvaldimir’s fate, scientists would have to secure tracking devices to his dorsal ridge with steel rods, a procedure that sometimes causes significant wounds and infections.
“I’m always in favor of getting animals into a more natural scenario, but you have to do it on a case-by-case basis,” says Ingrid Visser, a whale scientist who is known for her studies of orcas and spent several weeks observing Hvaldimir. “It has to be driven by the welfare of the animal first and foremost, and it has to be backed by robust and compassionate science.”
Last summer, following intense disagreement over Hvaldimir’s future, a majority of OneWhale’s scientific advisers, including Visser and every other cetacean expert, resigned. By September, Strand had left as well. Several of OneWhale’s former members claim that the organization’s leadership demonstrated a pattern of miscommunication, recklessness and a disregard for scientific expertise. They say that Crosby Haug presented the Svalbard proposal to the Norwegian government without properly consulting them and that she did not clearly convey the regulatory hurdles to OneWhale’s plans, namely the Norwegian laws that would complicate the confinement of a wild whale, even in the context of rehabilitation. (Crosby Haug and Siri Martinsen, leader of NOAH, dispute this.) They further contend that she spent too much time interacting with Hvaldimir in the water despite lacking the appropriate training, potentially reinforcing his dependency on humans and inadvertently encouraging tourists to do the same. (Crosby Haug denies this as well.)
