Nearly a month after the first in a devastating string of beluga deaths at Shedd Aquarium, its officials Friday offered preliminary answers about what may have gone wrong.
But some experts say the aquarium’s findings — chronic gastrointestinal disease in two whales and age-related health problems in another — fall short of explaining the deaths. The case of longtime Shedd resident Beethoven remains particularly unclear, said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist specializing in animal behavior.
“It’s baloney,” Marino said of linking the 34-year-old whale’s death to his age. “He was older, but that’s not old for a beluga in the wild.”
The report details necropsy and microscopic tissue examinations of two female belugas, 23-year-old Peekachu and 20-year-old Rain, who arrived in Chicago last month from the defunct Marineland park in Canada. Their deaths have since become central to questions surrounding the controversial relocation, an effort that brought ten rescued whales to Shedd and more than doubled the aquarium’s beluga population.
Both whales suffered from chronic gastrointestinal disease that likely developed months or years before their transport, aquarium officials said Friday. Peekachu, the first to die, had bird feathers, sticks and large rocks in her stomach, materials officials said she could not have come from Shedd.
“The timing of a visible decline does not necessarily tell us when a disease begins,” the aquarium said. “An animal’s condition can change quickly when the body is no longer able to compensate.”
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In the report, Shedd veterinarians said preexisting sickness likely compromised the whales’ health and left them vulnerable during the relocation process, which involved lifting the belugas by crane and flying them across international borders. The aquarium said it had anticipated that the whales could arrive with serious health problems given the reported conditions at Marineland, where owners had previously threatened to euthanize the belugas.
Marino, the president and founder of the Nova Scotia-based Whale Sanctuary Project, said acknowledging those vulnerabilities from the outset should have prompted authorities to more carefully consider the relocation. Travel can place enormous stress on belugas, she said, and the urgency of the rescue indicates the whales were likely showing signs of poor health.
“It raises really important questions about the judgment of whoever made the call to move them,” she said. “I’d like more information from the veterinarians who signed off on this.”
Those concerns were echoed by Camille Labchuk, lawyer and executive director of Animal Justice, who called Friday’s medical findings “deeply troubling.” Labchuk said Peekachu and Rain’s conditions point to what she described as neglectful care at Marineland. She criticized Canadian officials for failing to intervene before a “preventable crisis” forced a rushed relocation of the already fragile animals.
“There should have been efforts to improve the belugas’ health enough so they could withstand the stress of transport and a new, unfamiliar environment,” Labchuk, who oversees the Canadian animal law advocacy organization, said in a statement. “Marineland’s closure was a slow-moving train wreck that advocates and scientists saw coming from a hundred miles away.”
Shedd said veterinarians found no evidence of a shared infectious disease or environmental factor connecting the deaths of Peekachu, Rain and Beethoven. Beethoven, a 34-year-old whale who had lived at the aquarium for more than a decade, had “health changes associated with aging” that affected his cardiovascular system, veterinarians found.
The explanation was disappointingly predictable to Marino, who said aquariums often attribute such deaths to old age even though belugas can live up to 60 years in the wild. While captive whales often live only into their 30s, Marino said attributing their deaths to age fails to acknowledge the reality of why their lifespans are shorter.
She also said it’s important to examine how the relocation effort affected Beethoven, even though he was not transported himself.
“It was probably the stress of dealing with all the changes in his environment,” she said. “I don’t think we can ignore that or think this is just a coincidence.”
The most recent whale to die in Chicago, a 26-year-old female beluga named Osiris, was not included in Friday’s report. The aquarium had previously said in a blog post that Osiris was a less consistent eater than some of its other whales, and that her condition rapidly declined before she died Monday.
Veterinarians are still examining Osiris and conducting more testing for a range of fungal, bacterial and viral pathogens, the aquarium said. They are also tracking each surviving whale’s behavior and adjusting individual care plans as new needs emerge.
“No animal is where we want them to be clinically, but we are fortified by the incremental, step-by-step progress, which is often not linear,” the aquarium said. “Secord and Caspian remain the whales of greatest clinical concern at this time, and our teams continue to monitor them and the other rescued belugas around the clock.”
Shedd declined to comment further Friday afternoon to “keep the experts’ time, energy, and focus on the continued care and constant monitoring of the rest of the beluga pod.” A spokesperson stressed that the findings are preliminary and said the aquarium will share additional information as it becomes available.
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Jelly Bean, another rescued beluga, died at Oceanogràfic Valencia in Spain earlier this month. The Toronto Star reported that a conditional sale of Marineland went through last week, and the property is now being considered for a theme park.
Marino said Shedd is a significant improvement over Marineland and that she trusts the aquarium is providing the whales with proper care. What continues to alarm her, she said, is what happened to the animals before they arrived in Chicago.
“Rain and Peekachu were taken away from their family and put in a concrete tank,” Marino said. “Their problems started then — not during this move. Their problems started when we decided that it was a good idea to do that.”
baiduhai’s Finnegan Belleau contributed.