Five days after he was born, the reluctant baby beluga male at Shedd Aquarium finally did what is supposed to come naturally: He nursed from his mother for the first time early Wednesday morning.
But officials say the baby’s survival is far from certain and that medical milestones stretching over a year or more must be passed before the whale’s long-term health seems assured.
Meanwhile, the act of nursing was deemed so momentous by aquarium officials that they called a full-blown news conference to announce what the 5-foot-2-inch, 145-pound gunmetal-gray infant had done.
Ted Beattie, leader of the city’s busiest cultural institution, opened the best-attended news conference in the city Wednesday morning.
“As you can imagine,” said a sincere but relieved Beattie, director of the Shedd, “this is a most significant event for this institution.”
Ken Ramirez, the Shedd’s chief of marine mammal training and husbandry, underscored that the baby probably would have died without human intervention while he struggled to learn to nurse. Keepers at one point gave the calf shots containing natural immunizing agents it should normally receive from mother’s milk and had been giving it regular doses of baby formula and antibiotics.
“Without our intervention,” said Ramirez, “this calf might not have made it this far.”
His survival means a lot to the Shedd, which spent $43 million eight years ago to build the world’s largest indoor marine mammal pavilion, partially to be a whale breeding and research facility. A whale and a dolphin have been born there in the last couple of years, but neither survived their first day.
The fact that the calf seems to be nursing on a regular basis now means the keepers will suspend their twice-a-day formula feedings, Ramirez said, as the whale infant’s own mother’s milk is far superior nourishment.
“This (nursing) was a very important step in the baby’s survival and a very big relief,” he said, “but it by no means indicates we are in the clear. The baby has many milestones it still has to pass before we will feel more comfortable about his future.”
In the next couple of weeks keepers will keep close watch to see if the calf is taking in sufficient quantities of milk and if the milk has adequate nourishment. The Shedd will also continue to keep its whale pools closed to visitors, perhaps for the next several weeks.
“We also are waiting for another beluga birth in the next month or so,” Ramirez said, “and the exhibit will have to be closed for a time then, anyway.”
Puiji (poo-EE-jee), the mother of the unnamed baby, is now returning to her normal, svelte 1,500- pound figure after putting on 300 pounds during a 15-month pregnancy. She and the other pregnant female, Immiayuk (imee-A-yook), were collected by a Shedd expedition in the Churchill River along the Manitoba coast on Hudson Bay almost 10 years ago.
Immiayuk was with Puiji in the main beluga pool, the southernmost pool in the building, when Puiji gave birth Friday morning. The other whales and the Shedd’s five Pacific white-sided dolphins watched the birth as well through gated openings in their pools.
“He was born during the first dolphin show of the morning (in the Oceanarium’s main public pool), and the dolphins were all so captivated that all but one refused to go out and do the show,” said Marty Greenwell, a Shedd veterinarian.
“When Immiayuk noticed the dolphins, she raced out between their gate and Puiji and the calf and jaw-popped (a threatening beluga vocalization) at the dolphins.”
Though the baby was an adequate swimmer, he was so buoyant in the water that Ramirez said he and his staff felt he had some physiological problem. His buoyancy and somewhat weakened physical condition affected his ability to dive, which meant he could not do the underwater maneuvering a beluga calf must do to reach his mother’s mammary glands and nurse.
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At one point Saturday, concerned handlers pulled the infant out of the water while his mother rested her chin on a faux rocky shoreline in the pool inches away. She looked on while veterinarians injected the baby with antibodies–immunoglobulin–taken and preserved from the milk of the female beluga whose calf died shortly after being born at the Shedd last year.
Puiji, Greenwell said, worked diligently at getting the calf to eat, as well.
“She would put her head over his body and try to push him down toward her belly,” Greenwell said. “She frequently nudged his underside, too, as though she was telling him this is where he needed to be for feeding.”
On Sunday, the baby began to dive, and by Tuesday, he was making all the right maneuvers of gliding in his mother’s wake, seeking out her nipples, but still not recognizing he could have lunch on demand there. That came early Wednesday morning.
With nursing, Ramirez said the calf should grow visibly in the next two weeks, though he will be weighed periodically to confirm that growth.
After that, the next critical point is being introduced to other whales. He knows Immiayuk, who will be back with him and his mother Wednesday or Thursday after being removed from the pool Saturday to give Puiji and the infant a better chance to bond.
Shedd officials plan to let Puiji and the calf remain with Immiayuk during her delivery, and begin introducing them to other whales in the collection in a couple of months. Some time after those introductions, about five months from now, keepers will offer the calf frozen fish, with the expectation he will show the initial proper behavior of playing with the fish.
“If they don’t first play with the fish, it means they won’t eventually start eating them,” Ramirez said. “We expect them to start eating fish sometime after they are five months old.”
It takes a long time for beluga babies to be completely weaned from mother’s milk, however. As late as four years old, when most nourishment is coming from solid foods, some still periodically nurse from their mothers.
Even after a beluga baby gets past its first birthday, it still is vulnerable to myriad dangerous and potentially fatal hazards both in the wild and in predator-free aquarium pools with medical staffs.
The New York Aquarium, which has had four successful beluga births since 1992, saw two of its calves die at about age two, both related in part to nursing and poor maternal care issues.
But the aquarium community is beginning to see a payoff for its intensive work in the last two decades of research on beluga health, reproduction and social organization.
The New York Aquarium had the first surviving beluga calf birth in 1992. At the beginning of this summer, six surviving aquarium-born calves were thriving in various institutions in the U.S. and Canada. In the last week, three more babies have been born. Besides Puiji’s baby, beluga mothers delivered in Sea World in San Antonio Sunday and Sea World in Orlando Tuesday.
“In the arctic, where belugas live in nature,” said Clint Wright, marine mammal curator at Canada’s Vancouver Aquarium, “the ice begins to break up in the rivers and along the shorelines in June and July.
“That’s when the pregnant beluga mothers deliver their babies and come into shallow water. That’s why you see them delivering their babies in aquariums right now too. It’s the right time of year.”
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