The Mystic Aquarium has the country's largest outdoor beluga whale exhibit, called the "Alaskan Coast," with 750,000 gallons of water stretching over an acre. Designed to resemble the whales' native habitats of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway, and Russia, the naturalistic facility has jagged rocks, glacial streams, and driftwood. It even has a shallow cobbled area where the belugas can haul themselves onshore to scratch their bodies, a process that helps them shed their skin during molting season, just as wild belugas do in rocky estuaries.
"They're a pretty unique species, and there are not a lot of belugas in the US," said Lynn Marcoux, the aquarium's senior trainer of belugas. "They really define who we are as a facility."
Among the smallest species of whale, belugas typically grow to about 15 feet long and weigh around 2,000 pounds, although some Russian males can reach 3,500 pounds. They have stout bodies, blunt heads, a small beak, short rounded flippers, and no dorsal fin, and their life expectancy is 25 to 35 years; the three belugas in Mystic are estimated to be 26 years old.
Inuk, a male whose name means "old man" in Inuit, has been on loan to the aquarium for seven years from the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, Wash., as part of a "breeding loan" program. He will remain indefinitely. The two females, Kela ("gentle leader") and Naku ("the cross-eyed one"), are owned by the Mystic Aquarium.
In the past, Inuk sired two calves at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, but he has yet to help produce a calf in Mystic. That may be because the window of opportunity for a female beluga to become pregnant is very small; most females ovulate only once or twice a year for one to two days at a time. In the wild, belugas often engage in mass breedings, in which multiple males breed with multiple females, greatly increasing the chance a female will become pregnant.
Since that isn't possible in Mystic, the aquarium is considering artificial insemination for its belugas, a technique that has been successful with dolphins and killer whales, Marcoux said.
