Video of a man poking a 3-year-old Beluga whale at an aquarium in Shenzhen, China has gone viral. The video was filmed on Aug 12, where a man can be seen poking and squeezing the whale’s head to show a children nearby how soft it is.
The man, most likely the aquarium employee, said he spends a lot of time with the whale, named Dabai, and has built a special relationship with it. He said Dabai, normally very well-behaved only sometimes when it is naughty and will spray water on him, reported by Daily Mail.
“Then it laughs super cute in the video. I chat with it every day and it uses movements to respond to me. And its IQ can reach 20% of human beings. It’s very smart,” he added.
However not everyone saw the video think it’s ‘cute’, one concerned viewer wrote: ” It’s not safe to poke a Beluga’s head,” other also said ” It’s not a soft toy!.”
The bulging part of a Beluga whale’s head is the called the ‘melon’ and is an organ which directs and changes the frequency of the animal’s sound waves.
The area is soft because it is filled with oil and wax, with the brain is well protected behind the melon and inside the skull.