Now, this is cool. A kayaker in northern Norway was filming this beluga whale when he drops his GoPro in the water. The friendly mammal instantly retrieves it for him, saving the paddler some cash and lost footage (click to the 1:15 mark if you want to get right to it).
Some of you may actually recognize this particular whale as Hvaldimir, who was first spotted near the town of Hammerfest wearing a harness, many presumed for a camera. The harness was removed by the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries and The Inertia’s Alex Haro wrote about how it was labeled with the words, “Equipment of St. Petersburg,” leading many to believe the whale had been trained by the Russian Navy. Which, after watching this video, seems fairly feasible as the beluga interacts well with humans and obviously knows how to pick up foreign objects off the ocean floor and return them.
As Alex reported, Russia’s not the only country training animals for military purposes. Beginning in 1959, the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program out of San Diego trained bottlenose dolphins and sea lions to detect and clear mines and recover lost equipment, among other things.
