If it wasn’t hard enough being a fisherman near the small Norwegian fishing village of Inga, now harness-wearing whales are a problem.

A group of Norwegian fishermen raised the alarm when a beluga whale, kitted out with a harness and camera holster, started harassing them while they worked.

That wasn’t the weirdest part, though – marine experts in Norway think that the whale might be a Russian weapon.

Here’s The Guardian:

“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 harne

ss, which has now been removed from the whale, were the words “Equipment of St. Petersburg”.

I feel like if you’re going to train a covert whale spy, you shouldn’t put a lost-and-found label in the equipment.

Here he is, and he’s very cute:

If all of this sounds. a bit far-fetched, you should know that Russia has a history of training sea mammals.

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.

One of these bases is in Murmansk, where recent research has been conducted to see if beluga whales can be trained to guard entrances to naval bases, assist deep-water divers, and if necessary kill strangers who try to enter their territory.

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.

Classic seals.

Sucking up to the boss and making the whales look bad.

[source:guardian]