Heartwarming

Beached Baby Whale Lives On Thanks To These Devoted Kids

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It was a holiday like any other for this Quebecois family, who were relaxing on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in the Great Lakes... Up until their sons noticed a baby beluga whale beached on the shore.

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Source : @GREMM

They quickly realised that the young calf had probably been born just a few hours previously and was in grave danger. The Milliard brothers hurried to dig a hole in the sand and fill it with water toput the animal inside.15-year-old Nicholas tells CBC News:

Every five minutes we got it a bucket of water. The water level was dropping, and it was becoming more and more difficult to get water.

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Source : @GREMM

But the family's dedicated efforts paid off: they stabilised the baby beluga's condition until help arrived.

Researchers at the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals (GREMM) managed to get the whale back into the water, near another group of belugas they had spotted.

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Source : @GREMM

GREMM's president explained to Le Devoir that in doing this, they hoped one of the other whales would pick up on the baby's distress and take him under their wing. Sadly, a recent study indicates that this hasn't yet happened...It's an extremely worrying situation for the baby beluga. He's just a few days old and his survival is totally dependent on a lactating mother. These kind of whales usually feed their babies for two years, which shows how important it is that this baby finds his mother again.

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Source : @GREMM

If he survived being beached on the shores for hours, we wholeheartedly hope and believe he'll be okay until he finds a mother to take care of him.

His survival is all the more crucial since the beluga species is in steep decline in the St. Lawrence region: there are just 900 of these whales left in the area, compared to the thousands that once lived there.

If you want to help save the beluga whales, you can make a donation here.