It’s not a boy!
Nobody is exactly red-faced about it, including the youngster or the parents, but a beluga whale calf at the Shedd Aquarium identified at the time of its birth July 17 as male has, upon closer examination, turned out to be female.
The final determination of the calf’s gender was made Tuesday night during a medical examination of the infant, if that is what you call a 260-pound kid that puts on an average of 1 3/4 pounds a day, much of it blubber. It was the first comprehensive exam of the thriving, still-unnamed newcomer.
Until keepers can actually examine the youngsters, determining the gender of newborn belugas can be tricky, said Ken Ramirez, Shedd’s vice president of animal collections and animal training.
“In most dolphins and whales, when a baby is born, all you have to do is look to see if it has mammary slits, and you know it is a female, because males don’t have them,” said Ramirez. “But both male and female belugas have mammary slits.
“With belugas, you look to see if the baby has distinctly separate genital and anal slits, which indicate a male, as those slits on females usually are so close together, they appear as one.”
More Top Picks Best Wine Dispensers
On that basis, he said, when this baby was born in July two staffers were certain it was a boy. As the baby grew and put on weight, however, the sex became less clear.
“Ultimately, early gender identification doesn’t matter, anyway,” said Ramirez, “as we’re really only concerned that the baby and mother are bonding and acting appropriately, and the baby is healthy.”
In the past, veterinarians have chosen not to look closely at healthy beluga newborns until they are 5 or 6 months old. But this youngster has seemed so extraordinarily healthy that the staff decided to take an earlier look and gather some invaluable baseline data on what makes a healthy beluga baby tick, including blood samples.
“We have blood samples of very young belugas that didn’t survive,” he said, “but we didn’t know what blood from a healthy baby beluga looked like.”
On Tuesday, after the aquarium closed for the day, keepers isolated the youngster and her mother, Puiji, in the medical pool, then lowered the pool to a depth of 3 feet. About 20 keepers waded into the pool, some to pet and preoccupy the mother, others to assist examining vets.
“It was a situation unlike any she had ever encountered before, in water that shallow with people standing all around,” said Ramirez. “Her mother is so used to us, she calmly accepted it all, and that relaxed the baby, I think.”
At one point, they even put the youngster in a fleece-lined sling and raised her out of the water to get her exact weight, 259 pounds. Her estimated weight at birth 11 weeks ago was 125 pounds.
“Her mother’s milk is extremely rich. In nature, she would have been born in a relatively warm river in July,” he said, “and by now she would have swum out to much colder deep ocean water, so she has developed the thick layer of blubber wild calves have for that reason.”
The calf remained calm and quiet through the 20-minute exam, he said.
“I can tell you that the first time I took my daughter to the doctor for a blood sample it was a lot more difficult than it was with this session with this whale,” Ramirez said, laughing.
After it was over, Puiji and the calf went back to the pool they share with another female adult, Naya. In 10 days or so, the staff plans to bring another whale in with them, one of two other youngsters born at the aquarium, Kayavak, 7, a girl, or Qannik, 6, a boy.