Shedd Aquarium’s long wait for its first baby beluga whale ended sadly early Tuesday when a 160-pound, 4-foot 9-inch male calf died just hours after being born.
Almost immediately after its mother, Mauyak, gave birth at 7:59 p.m. Monday, the calf showed signs of being too weak to swim strongly enough to breathe properly, said Ken Ramirez, the aquarium’s chief marine mammal trainer. Shedd keepers removed the calf and put it on a respirator within 15 minutes of its birth when they suspected it had taken water into its lungs. It died at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday.
The death of a newborn cetacean–the animal order that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises–is not uncommon within the first 24 hours. In fact, cetacean babies both in the wild and in captivity have high mortality rates in their first year of life, Ramirez said.
“Even though these are marine animals,” he said, “they are mammals who live by breathing air, and in their first day or so of life, they have difficulty swimming well enough to get to the water’s surface to breathe. If they fail to get a proper breath of air in time, they drown.”
That appeared to be the case with Mauyak’s calf. A necropsy (animal autopsy) performed on it after it died showed that it had water on the lungs, Ramirez said.
Mauyak (pronounced MY-ak) was the first whale to become pregnant in the Shedd’s $41 million Oceanarium, opened in 1991 with high hopes of becoming a beluga breeding center. The death of the calf was deeply disappointing to the Shedd’s marine mammal keepers.
“We all had been so hopeful that this calf would make it,” said Ramirez.
Mauyak, 16, and a male beluga, Inuk (EE-nook), 16, came to the Shedd on loan from Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo in March 1997, to join two female belugas and one male already at the Shedd. Mauyak had given birth twice in Tacoma, both calves dying within a day.
Had her latest calf survived, it would have been the seventh successful birth among North America’s 34 captive belugas. There is a chance, Ramirez said, that one of its other females is pregnant, as the Oceanarium’s two other females mated regularly this spring with the males.
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