The Shedd Aquarium again appears set to sail into stormy waters with animal rights groups who are threatening to employ an air and sea armada of helicopters and surfboards to oppose a California dolphin-collection expedition by the aquarium.
Five months after the deaths of two beluga whales at the aquarium, Shedd officials said Tuesday that they intend this year to use a federal permit issued to them in 1988 to capture three more Pacific white-sided dolphins in California.
The aquarium already has four of the dolphins, one male and three females caught in 1988, but it wants to catch another male and two females for its Oceanarium exhibit before its permit expires at the end of this year.
California animal rights groups, however, vow to mount strong opposition to any Shedd expedition.
“If they do it,” said Peter Wallerstein, founder of a Los Angeles-based group called Whale Rescue Team, “we have a flotilla of boats, we have kayaks, surfboards, airplanes and helicopters ready to go out and protect our dolphins.”
Another group, the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute, also promised to send boats to protest any capture expedition.
“Taking (white-sided dolphins) from their natural habitat should be a thing of the past,” said Mark Berman, spokesman for the institute. “It’s time to just leave them be and not take them out of their natural habitat.”
Jim Robinett, the Shedd’s curator of marine mammals, said the aquarium will collect three animals between the mainland of Southern California and the islands that include Santa Catalina. Timing of the expedition depends on when spotters for the Shedd see dolphins begin to show up in large numbers along shallow coastal waters, he said.
“We have no timetable,” Robinett said. “There is no established time when the dolphins appear in south California waters. The animals move in and out according to water temperatures and food availability.”
Whenever the collection expedition gets under way, it is unlikely that the Shedd will be able to carry it off quietly. Terms of the capture permits insist that the aquarium give the U.S. Marine Fisheries Service two weeks’ notice before collections begin. Collection boats also will have to fly identifying yellow pennants inscribed with the permit numbers.
About 20 Pacific white-sided dolphins are now in captivity in American aquariums, Robinett said.
Because so few have been held and studied in captive collections, Robinett said, little is known about the species. The Shedd hopes to become a captive breeding center for the dolphins. The four now at the Oceanarium, juveniles about 8 years old, already are engaging in sexual activity, he said.
Dolphins are cetaceans, and Robinett said that marine biologists believe captive cetaceans ideally breed most successfully if the collection has at least two males.
“If you have more than one male in the collection,” he said, “you have heightened competition and higher breeding success. Our four animals are doing just fine, but because they usually are in our big, 2-million-gallon pool, we think we would have a more natural presentation with a larger number of them.”
A wave of criticism washed over the Shedd in September when two of four beluga whales it had collected in Canada a month earlier died. Though the cause of the deaths was not determined, Shedd officials believe they were related to a de-worming medicine injected into the whales minutes before they went into fatal convulsions.
Animal rights groups said the deaths demonstrated the cruelty of keeping large marine mammals in captivity.
Now the California critics are charging that the white-sided dolphin in particular does not fare well in captivity.
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They charge that of the 35 white-sided dolphins displayed at San Diego’s Sea World over the years, only nine remain alive, and they say that other aquariums also have had trouble keeping the species.
“Half of all the white-sided dolphins captured die within the first two weeks, and the rest have a shortened life span of an average of 5.6 years in captivity,” said Berman, of the Earth Island Institute.
“If you want to study them, you study them in their own habitat, where they belong,” he said. “If you want to show them to the public, use videos and other non-intrusive technology, such as organizing whale-watching trips and dolphin-watching trips.
“We don’t see any educational value in seizing these free-swimming, deep-diving mammals and putting them in concrete tanks.”
Robinett said the numbers used by critics are misleading because they date back 20 years when white-sided dolphins first were collected and displayed when nothing was known of husbandry techniques for them.
The last collection of white-sided dolphins was in 1988, he said, when Sea World of Florida collected four animals at the same time that the Shedd collected four.
One of the Sea World animals became ill, and the Shedd, because it was keeping its dolphins in California for several months pending completion of the Oceanarium, agreed to trade for it so it would not be moved during medical treatment. After two months of treatment, however, the animal died of bacterial septicemia, and the Shedd had to collect a fifth dolphin, thus using up five of its eight capture permits.
“It would be more realistic to look at those last nine captures in 1988,” Robinett said. “Of those, eight of the animals are healthy and thriving in their captive environments, where we are learning more about them every day and the public is getting to know about them and their natural habitat.”