The medical and animal care staff at Shedd Aquarium have been on an emotional rollercoaster the past few months. There was elation in July when the team pulled off the successful rescue of four female beluga whales from the defunct Marineland park in Canada. Four more females from Marineland followed in mid-August and watching them join their pod-mates was a sight Dr. Karisa Tang will never forget. “Reuniting those two groups of females that lived together in Marineland was really, really beautiful in watching how they greeted each other and rubbed on each other,” said Tang, lead veterinarian and vice president of animal health at Shedd.
But then came the lows. Two whales in that second group — Peekachu and Rain — have since died, along with Beethoven, a longtime member of Shedd’s resident beluga pod. Though the public is clamoring for answers, Tang said staff is still assembling the pieces of a complicated puzzle, waiting on test results and lab reports from facilities across the country.
“A post-mortem, what we call a necropsy exam, is very complex and it involves a lot of different people,” Tang said. She will say that all of the deaths were “unexpected.”
Some backstory: Tang and her colleagues at Shedd, along with their counterparts at the other institutions involved in the rescue of Marineland’s 30 belugas and four dolphins, were always keenly aware they were undertaking an inherently risky, high-stakes operation. Moving 2,000-pound aquatic mammals from the only home most had ever known, placing them in shipping containers, loading them on planes and then releasing them into completely foreign surroundings was never going to be an easy transition.
But as challenging as each move was, Tang knew the whales’ arrival at Shedd was just the beginning, not the culmination of the rescue. “I think we have months before we take a breath, to be totally honest,” Tang said. “This is going to be a long process of acclimation. We still have 24/7 monitoring. Yes, our phones are still on at all hours of the night. We’re asking, ‘What does today look like? What does tomorrow look like?’ It’s really about survival and triage, wanting these whales to thrive.”
