Recently, residents of Venice discovered a whale in their canal. Apparently it had sailed from the Atlantic. The whale drowned a few gondolas with its tail. A passenger of one of the gondolas drowned. Global warming, apparently, knocked the whale off the “course” and it ended up in the Mediterranean Sea through Gibraltar, instead of the North Atlantic.
This was the second time a whale appeared off the coast of Venice. The first time was during the WW2. There was a famine then, and the locals killed and ate the whale. Nowadays there is no war, and no one was going to kill the whale. However, the whale caused a lot of problems. His huge tail managed to sink several boats. Environmentalists were able to get the whale to follow the sonar placed in a small research ship.
They managed to save the whale and bring it to the ocean, but, unfortunately, there were some casualties. As it turned out later, the passenger in the gondola that the whale drowned, was dead. He was a 56-year-old businessman from Poland, named Joseph Galchik.
The residents of Venice are used to getting into contact with marine animals, and it doesn’t always have a happy ending. Last year, due to the rather aggressive behavior of dolphins at the entrance to the Grand Canal, in the area of the Cathedral of Santa Maria della Salute, coastal services were forced to rescue five gondoliers who got into the water as a result of attacks by their boats by dolphins.
