Timmy the whale ‘is most likely dead’ just days after private donors spent £1.3 MILLION to save him

Timmy the humpback whale is most likely dead, experts say, just days after private donors spent £1.3 million to fund the controversial rescue.

The 10-meter-long mammal – whose health had seriously deteriorated after being stranded since March – was released on Saturday after being transported by rescuers in a water-filled ship.

But just days after Timmy entered the North Sea off the coast of Denmark, and due to a lack of tracking data, the German Oceanographic Museum determined that he did not survive the transition to deep water.

“Since the whale was in an extremely weakened state and stranded repeatedly within a short time after previous rescue attempts, it is very likely that it did not have enough strength to swim in deep water for some time and is no longer alive,” the museum told German newspaper Ostsee-Zeitung on Tuesday.

Scientists have long disagreed with the mission to save Timmy, maintaining that he was unlikely to survive rescue attempts due to his health and that a more ethical approach would be to let him die peacefully.

But a motley crew of veterinarians and rescuers, spurred on by Germany’s national frenzy to save the whale, wouldn’t take no for an answer despite fierce warnings.

The rescue effort was privately funded by two millionaires, MediaMarkt co-founder Walter Gunz and horse racing entrepreneur Karin Walter-Mommert, who said they were willing to pay “whatever it costs” to free Timmy.

The creature has been described as lethargic and covered in blister-like spots, and parts of its mouth were believed to have been caught in a fishing net.

The stranded humpback whale was released on Saturday after a rescue mission that cost £1.3 million

Timmy was transported in a flooded cargo ship after being recovered from a shallow bay at Wismar near the city of Lübeck

The creature first became stranded on a sandbank in Wismar Bay, near the city of Lübeck, almost six weeks ago.

When his health deteriorated, German authorities suspended efforts to save the mammal and insisted he could not be released.

But after a spike in national interest around Timmy – with supporters baking whale-shaped cakes and getting tattooed with images of the mammal – officials were convinced to approve the privately funded operation.

Initial attempts to rescue Timmy, using inflatable pads and pontoons, were unsuccessful, but last week divers finally managed to lure the whale onto a flooded ship towed by the Fortuna B ship.

On Saturday, the whale left the ship in the North Sea around 8:45 a.m. local time and was later observed blowing through the blowhole and swimming freely “in the right direction,” the rescue mission’s Walter-Mommert said.

Till Backhaus, the Social Democratic Minister of the Environment of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, expressed the hope for a ‘happy ending’.

And hope was still alive on Monday when the whale’s GPS tracker sent out several signals in the morning, indicating Timmy had emerged from the water to breathe.

But now experts believe the GPS transmitter was faulty and did not have the necessary capabilities to detect signs of life, and Timmy’s fate seems much less certain.

‘I believe the whale will die very soon now. And I would also like to ask the question: what’s so bad about that?’ said Thilo Maack, a marine biologist with Greenpeace, earlier this month

Efforts to save the mammal were criticized by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) as ‘inadvisable’, with experts saying the creature ‘appeared seriously compromised’ and was ‘unlikely to survive’ attempts to move it to deeper water.

Continuing to try to save the creature amounted to “pure animal cruelty,” said Burkard Baschek, director of the Oceanographic Museum in Stralsund.

“A rescue attempt… is no longer worthwhile… this has been repeatedly confirmed to us by international colleagues,” he warned ahead of the mission.

Experts at the museum warned again last Wednesday against releasing the whale into the open sea as it was in danger of drowning, and called on the team behind the rescue operation to be transparent, including by providing data on the mammal’s whereabouts and publishing its location if it was released.

‘I believe the whale will die very soon now. And I would also like to ask the question: what’s so bad about that?’ said Thilo Maack, a marine biologist with Greenpeace, earlier this month.

‘Yes, animals live, animals die. This animal is really, really sick. And it has decided to seek peace.”

The Danish Environment Ministry told German TV channel Deutsche Welle that it had no intention of rescuing Timmy if he were to become stranded again. It describes whale beaching as a “completely natural phenomenon.”