A Canadian theme park closed in 2024, kept dozens of beluga whales in limbo for over a year, and then announced it would kill all of them if nobody came up with a plan. Someone came up with a plan. Nine whales are now in Texas, which is not a sentence you expect to type on a Tuesday.
The Whales, the Park, and the Threat That Started All This
Marineland, a theme park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, shut its doors to the public in 2024. The animals, however, stayed. For roughly a year after closing, the park held onto its beluga population while claiming it no longer had the resources to properly care for them.
Then came the ultimatum. According to CBS News, Marineland announced it would have no choice but to euthanize the whales if a relocation plan or additional funding was not secured. That is a remarkable thing for an institution to say out loud. We cannot care for these animals, and if you do not take them from us immediately, we will kill them.
To be clear: these are beluga whales. Highly intelligent, socially complex animals. Some of them weigh over 1,200 pounds. You cannot exactly open the back door and shoo them out. Any rescue would require a coordinated international operation involving specialized water-filled transport units, flatbed trucks, cargo planes, government approval from NOAA, and willing recipient facilities across two countries. The clock was ticking.
The Largest Beluga Transfer in U.S. History, No Big Deal
The second group of seven female belugas, Xena, Gemini, Skyla, Meeka, Eve, Neva, and Calypso, arrived at SeaWorld San Antonio on Tuesday, completing what CBS News describes as the largest beluga transfer ever completed in the United States. These seven joined two males, Frankie and Bertie Botts, who made the same nearly 2,000-mile journey from Niagara Falls to San Antonio during the first relocation last month.
Four additional whales from that first transport went to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. So the current tally: nine whales in Texas, four in Illinois, and seventeen still at Marineland waiting for their turn. Future destinations include aquariums in Georgia, San Diego, and Spain, though officials have not announced a timeline for those moves.
Steve Aibel, SeaWorld San Antonio's vice president of zoological operations, rode along with the animals on the second transport. "We are so happy that all went well and the second transport of this huge rescue effort is complete," he told CBS News. The newly arrived whales are currently in a private habitat away from public view, receiving veterinary care and being monitored as they settle in.
The Government Had to Get Involved, Because of Course It Did
This was not a simple cross-border animal transfer. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued relocation approvals in July, citing a grim but straightforward rationale: there are no other facilities in Canada that are able to provide the whales husbandry or medical care. That is NOAA's language, not ours. Canada, a country of 40 million people and considerable coastline, apparently had zero qualified options for these animals.
The approvals were necessary to ensure the belugas could receive the medical treatment and care that was unavailable to them at Marineland. Without that federal sign-off, the whole operation would have been dead in the water, so to speak. The logistics alone boggle the mind: specialized pressurized transport containers, round-the-clock monitoring during transit, veterinary staff on the flight. Getting a beluga whale from Ontario to Texas is not like driving a dog to the vet.
Seventeen Still Waiting
The good news is that nine animals are safe, adjusting to new tanks, and apparently doing well. The two males already at SeaWorld are being slowly introduced to the existing whale population at the park, per CBS News. That is a delicate process with highly social animals, but caretakers say it is going smoothly.
The less good news is that seventeen belugas remain at Marineland. Moves to Georgia, Chicago, San Diego, and Spain are expected, but no dates have been set. That means seventeen animals are still living in a closed theme park run by people who openly said they could not care for them. The urgency here has not disappeared just because the cameras have moved on.
The international cooperation involved in pulling this off deserves credit. This required U.S. and Canadian officials, multiple aquariums, federal regulators, and a small army of marine mammal specialists all working in concert under a deadline set by a theme park's threat to start euthanizing whales. That it is working is genuinely impressive. That it needed to happen at all is something else entirely.
The Dingo Take
A private company acquired dozens of beluga whales, ran a theme park around them for years, closed that park, kept the whales anyway, ran out of money or willingness to care for them, and then told the world it would kill them if someone did not come take them away. And the response to that has been, largely, a rescue story. Heartwarming photos. Names like Xena and Bertie Botts. Nobody is particularly focused on the part where a corporation held intelligent marine mammals hostage to force a publicly funded solution to a problem of its own making.
To be fair, the rescuers are the heroes here, and the whales are going somewhere better. Caretakers rode cargo planes with 1,200-pound animals across two time zones because someone had to, and apparently these were the people willing to do it. That counts for something real.
But seventeen whales are still sitting in a shuttered Canadian theme park right now, and the institution responsible for them has already demonstrated exactly how seriously it takes that responsibility. The timeline for the remaining moves is unannounced. The urgency is real. Someone should probably be paying very close attention to what happens next, because Marineland has already told us exactly what it is willing to do when it decides it is done.
Comments