Associate Professor Andreas Altenburger at UiT moved to Tromsø to study microscopic invertebrates. On a trip to work on Wednesday morning, he came across a completely different “sea animal”.
Andreas Altenburger captured the video of the swimming elk cow from Tromsøbrua on Wednesday morning, around 09.38.
– I cycled to work, and had to stop because I saw something big swimming on the way to the island. When I looked down, it was a huge elk. That was not what I expected to see, he says.
RESEARCHER: Andreas Altenburger, Associate Professor of Marine Biology at UiT.
Photo: UiT
Altenburger moved to Tromsø in 2020. Here he works with research on marine, invertebrates that live on the seabed.
– I work with animals you have to use a microscope to see. This is the first time I see a moose! It’s a little bigger than what I’m used to working with, he says and laughs.
Elgkua went swimming from Tromsdalen, swam over to Bunker Oil on Fr. Nansen’s place and swam further north along the quays, before turning and heading towards the mainland again.
Einar Mellomgård in Tromsø Ettersøksring informs Nordlys that he has received several calls about the animal so far.
He says that moose usually swim over from the mainland at Biltrend.
– Then they go ashore south of the island, but this may have been taken by the current since it came so far north. It is not so easy to get ashore in the north with quays and embankments where it is difficult for the moose to get a foothold, says Mellomgård.
He says that moose are good at resting while swimming and that the animals can swim for hours.
To iTromsø, Mellomgård says that they do not know where the animal is now, but says that it probably came ashore at Rema or on the mainland side.
– We hope so – not that it is on the island, but that it managed, he adds.