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Consumer Reports


After being raised by humans, beluga learns how to be a whale

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) The morning after Christmas in 1999, frantic keepers at the Shedd Aquarium hauled the dying young queen of their beluga whale collection from an off-view medical pool, trying to find some way to save her.

Nothing worked, and Immiayuk died a few minutes later. Her bewildered baby female calf, a week shy of 5 months old, hovered alone in the medical pool, and many sobbing aquarium workers feared she, too, soon would be dead.

The calf, Kayavak, was 100 percent dependent on her mother's milk for survival and at least a year away from being weaned naturally to whole food.

Before the day was out, dozens of human handlers at the Shedd began an extraordinary effort to save her. For the next year, she had at least two human companions with her 24 hours a day, at least one of them swimming in the water with her for at least 30 minutes of every hour.

Over the next five years Kayavak (KIGH-ah-vock) would live a life of high and sometimes heartbreaking drama as the first human-reared beluga whale in history. After a long period of isolation when she was pampered by anxious human trainers trying to keep her alive, Kayavak has had to beg for acceptance as a whale.

The first time she swam into a pool with the entire Shedd beluga pod, all the other animals turned on her.

"It was tough watching her get beaten up on repeatedly," said one of her human stepparents, trainer Tracey Kihnke. "But that's how whales establish hierarchy in the wild."

Today Kayavak - recognizable by a big, splotchy, milky white birthmark on her back - is healthy, and the other belugas finally have accepted her, albeit as the lowliest individual in their pecking order.

Her survival is a shining achievement for the Shedd's Oceanarium, which has suffered the loss of several whales since the aquarium opened it in 1991 in hopes of making it into a major beluga breeding center.

"She didn't have a mother to teach her how to be a beluga whale," said chief marine mammal trainer Ken Ramirez, the architect of Kayavak's survival plan. "I'm really proud that we were able to train her to be one."

The calf's mother, Immiayuk, was one of the Shedd's first two resident whales, captured as a 3-year-old along with another female the same age, Puiji, in 1989.

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In 1992, the Shedd brought in four more young wild-caught belugas. Shortly after they arrived, disaster struck when two of them died from improperly high dosages of deworming medicine prescribed by a veterinary handbook. Their deaths set off a firestorm of criticism by animal rights activists opposed to keeping dolphins and whales in captivity.

Five years later, the Shedd imported two older belugas, a male and a female, to join the breeding effort. Inuk, the visiting male, impregnated the female he accompanied to the Shedd, named Mauyak. When her calf died shortly after it was born in 1998, critics heaped more scorn on the aquarium.

But by then the two original females, Immiayuk and Puiji, were pregnant.

Puiji was the first to give birth, to a male calf on July 23, 1999. Right away he provided high drama when he took five days to get the hang of nursing and exhibited other signs of congenital defects.

On Aug. 3, 1999, Immiayuk gave birth to Kayavak. The newborn immediately impressed senior trainer Maggie Fahner.

"I thought, `Wow! What a little spitfire she is.' She came out and started swimming all over the place right away, looking over every inch of the pool," Fahner said.

Despite the two births, 1999 turned out to be the worst year in the Oceanarium's history. First Puiji's calf, weak since birth, died Aug. 25. Then, in December, the sudden illness and death of Kayavak's mother - later attributed to a rare but deadly infection - stunned everyone.

Outside the Shedd, activists erupted into protests. Inside, Ramirez told trainers to get in the pool and give the newly orphaned baby some attention, just as her mother had done.

Fahner remembers still being teary from Immiayuk's death as she put on her wetsuit and snorkel gear to swim over to the bewildered calf.

"Well, we're just going to have to make this work," she remembers thinking. "We have no choice. We're not going to lose this calf."

The biggest problem was the possibility Kayavak soon would starve to death.

"We had three options we could consider to feed her," said Jeff Boehm, the Shedd's chief veterinarian.

One was to create an artificial milk formula that would simulate the nourishment of mother's milk. The second was to pair her with Puiji, who had lost her calf just four months earlier and might be able to begin lactating again.

"The third option seemed like the dark horse solution, the least plausible, which was to let humans feed by switching her over to solid food - fish - immediately," Boehm said.

They had only a few hours to choose. Letting the calf go hungry for long would weaken her when she needed all her strength to live.

As no adequate artificial formula yet has been devised for belugas, that option was quickly dropped.

"As for using Puiji as a foster mother, we didn't have confidence that she would bond with the calf, nor did we know if she could feed her at all," Boehm said.

That left the third option.

Years earlier Ramirez had fed whole fish to an orphaned bottlenose dolphin nearly as young as Kayavak, and a couple of other facilities the Shedd hurriedly consulted also reported similar successes. But nobody had tried it with a whale.

"We knew if we were able to feed her fish ourselves that we could get sufficient food and hydration into her more effectively," he said. "We just weren't sure if her gastrointestinal system would be able to handle fish well enough for her to digest them."

Ramirez ordered his staff to lower the water level in the medical pool so trainers could stand and hold Kayavak while others slid frozen fish down her throat.

Because she had nursed more or less constantly from her mother, the hand-feeding process was scheduled for every three hours, around the clock, lowering and raising the pool's water level each time.

"It became a labor of love," said Ramirez, who slept on the floor of his office for two weeks to take part in the early feeding.

Over the next days and weeks, she gradually learned to take fish from the hands of trainers.

"We filled the pool up and sat on ladders in the water so that she could swim up to us to take fish," Ramirez said. "Then we were able to get out of the water and simply hand her food from the side of the pool."

At her mother's death, Kayavak weighed 257 pounds, twice her birth weight. During her first five weeks on a fish diet, she maintained that weight. After that, she began to put on weight steadily.

Because of the repeated water drops in her pool during feeding times, Kayavak had to remain isolated from other whales. Trainers took up the slack as her social companions.

"We did months of overnights with her, bonding with her while we fed and played with her," Fahner said. "We were cold and exhausted, but it was for the love of this animal. They were some of the most wonderful times of my life.

"She used to get fed at 1 a.m. and then 4 a.m., and for some reason she always got very lively at 3 a.m., wanting to play. She was so much fun, a lot of us competed to get to stay overnight for that 3 a.m. play time."

With snorkels on, two trainers would swim with Kayavak, bringing along toys like cloth stars, Frisbees and inner tubes, which a trainer would sit in while Kayavak pushed it around the pool. She loved to have trainers reach in her mouth to tickle her tongue, and to get total body rubdowns by brush-wielding humans.

"She is so focused on people, it's like she's a little person," Kihnke said. "For a while, she may have actually thought she was a human."

The play and feeding eventually evolved into serious training. Kayavak learned to present various body parts to trainers for health checks and to present her tail for blood samples. She mastered "fun" behaviors, like spitting streams of water at aquarium visitors watching from railings near her pool.

But when it came time for Kayavak to swim with whales and learn the complex rules and social behaviors of beluga society, life suddenly took a dark turn for the pampered orphan.

Integrating Kayavak with the other whales was a gradual process beginning about a year after her mother's death. At first trainers would put her with one adult female, either Naya or Puiji, both of whom would tolerate her for a couple of hours before turning on her.

Then she went in a pool for more extended periods with Mauyak and her male calf, Qannik, who was born a year after Kayavak.

Extremely protective of Qannik, his mother would not let Kayavak swim with them and drove her away whenever she tried to play with the young calf.

"Qannik would wait until Mauyak snoozed off," Fahner said. "Then he'd rush over to Kayavak to play."

After 20 minutes or so, however, Mauyak would wake up and charge over to retrieve her son.

After Kayavak turned 3, it was time to put her with all five of the other whales at the Shedd, including the big male, Naluark. All of them, even playmate Qannik, turned on her. They chased Kayavak into an adjoining pool, biting her, beating her up, rejecting her.

Belugas determine their position in the group through dominance, with newcomers occupying the lowest place.

Dominance is established, Ramirez said, by threatening and chasing the victim with loud jaw-popping, bites and teeth rakes across the body. "Jaw-popping" is a threatening noise the whales make by repeatedly slamming their jaws tight.

For months, Kayavak swam around with skin dinged and scraped from her encounters.

"They kept her away, chasing her from whatever pool they were swimming in," said trainer Liz Deatherage, "but she would keep trying."

Finally, a trainer arrived to work at 6:30 a.m. one day to find all six whales swimming together, with Kayavak at the side of Puiji, the dominant female.

As the lowliest animal in the group, she still gets picked on, but the group chases have stopped, and now she can fight back.

"It took a long time for Kayavak to show any defense mechanisms for herself," Ramirez said. "Finally, now, she sometimes postures back at an aggressive animal. Those are good social skills to have in a normal beluga. We had to let her get into some scrapes to learn this."

Kayavak's success is important not just to the Shedd but also to other marine mammal facilities.

"Right now we have 33 belugas living in U.S. and Canadian institutions," said Dave Denardo, general curator at the New York Aquarium. He is also the unofficial overseer of those belugas, which live in facilities stretching from New York to California and Florida to British Columbia.

"Any animal's survival is extremely important to a population this small," Denardo said. "Any calf we have born is extremely important to survival of this particular group."

From the dark days after the death of Kayavak's mother, the Shedd has recovered to having perhaps the premier beluga collection in North America, he said.

"The Shedd has one of the best aggregations of (belugas) in captivity because of its good sex ratio of two males to four females, and because they have a pregnancy due next summer," Denardo said. "They are looking the best to succeed in terms of future breeding."

The Shedd's experience with Kayavak has added to basic knowledge about social behavior and physiology of belugas, said Jay Sweeney, president of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums.

"When we have a success in dealing with a difficult situation like this, we're all richer for the knowledge that results, making every one of us better prepared," he said.

Today, Ramirez said, Kayavak spends a lot of time with other whales, especially with Qannik, but given the choice she will "still pick humans over another whale."

"But we don't mean everything to her anymore, like we did two years ago, when we were her only source of emotional support," Ramirez said.

"There are times now when you can go out next to the pool where she's swimming with other whales, and she'll acknowledge your presence, but turn her attention back to the whales."

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