Very Polite Canadian Belugas Have Made Friends With a Lone Narwhal

It’s hard to resist the cute factor of cross-species friendship. And so it’s with great joy that we report that Canada’s beluga whales appear to be just as polite as the rest of their countrymen when it comes to making friends with other species. One pod of belugas seems to have adopted a stray narwhal, according to the CBC.

The narwhal, captured in drone footage taken by researchers from the Canadian marine conservation nonprofit GREMM, has been spotted three years in a row swimming closely with a pod of young, mostly male beluga whales in the St. Lawrence estuary in Québec. The narwhal seems to exhibit beluga behaviors like blowing bubbles, and acts playful with the rest of the group. The same whale was spotted swimming with belugas in the area in 2016 and 2017, according to photo comparisons.

The sighting is notable because it took place more than 600 miles south of normal narwhal territory. The Arctic whales typically don’t venture farther south than Ungava Bay, located at the northern edge of Québec east of Hudson Bay.

In a post on GREMM’s site Whales Online, the researchers behind the footage speculate that climate change might make these sights more regular. The beluga and the narwhal both belong to the same cetacean family, Monodontidae, and as the waters in the Arctic warm, the two species’ territories might start to overlap more frequently. This could eventually lead to whale hybrids, even, similar to how shrinking sea ice has brought polar bears and grizzlies together more often, leading to interbreeding. This narwhal may have strayed far from his normal territory, losing track of his own kind before taking up with this band of friendly young whales.