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Stray whale wades into Buenos Aires marina

Xinhua, August 4, 2015 Adjust font size:

A stray whale on Monday waded into a dike at the Puerto Madero Marina in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, drawing crowds of onlookers.

While whales are periodically sighted in the Patagonian province of Chubut, some 1,439 km south of Buenos Aires, they are an unusual sight among yachts in the capital.

The six-meter-long humpback minke whale suddenly appeared "near the yachts moored at the Yacht Club, looking lost," the state news agency Telam reported.

Officials were trying to lead the young whale, which a wildlife expert estimated to be two years old, out of the dike and into open waters.

A video on Telam's website showed a group of conservationists in life jackets aboard an inflatable boat floating near the creature, which occasionally broke the water's surface.

Meanwhile, hundreds of residents and visitors lined the marina, snapping pictures of the whale with their phones and cameras.

Pablo Fioramontti, president of an association of whale-watching guides in Chubut's Puerto Piramides region, told a radio station that "from the images I'm seeing" on TV, the whale did not appear to be a regional variety and was "probably disoriented," especially as it ended up in a freshwater environment.

Officials would have to try and "guide the whale to the mouth of the river" and out to sea, he said. Endi