|
Dolphin dies at Shedd
 Brought to Chicago two years ago in hopes that he would impregnate the Shedd Aquarium's four female Pacific white-sided dolphins, an aging but proven dolphin sire named Jump died on Monday 23 July in an off-view medical pool. Jump was at least 30 years old and probably succumbed to age-related ailments, Shedd officials said.
He had been in periodic poor health for the last year and over the weekend was showing signs of being in pain so vets administered analgesics, however the dolphin continued to get weaker and eventually died at 10.45am. The aquarium announced that preliminary results from a necropsy seemed to support age-related failure of internal organs but more detailed results from tissue samples will not be available for about three weeks.
Jump had been one of the more successful sires in the early attempts to establish a captive breeding program for Pacific white-sided dolphins. He spent much of his life at Sea World in San Antonio and despite his advancing age when he came to Chicago in 2005, Jump was still considered a viable sire. Scientists at the Shedd hoped he would mate successfully with the aquarium's four females, but they also wanted to do studies on Jump's semen in connection with the Shedd's artificial-insemination experiments. Jump mated frequently with the females during his first year at the Shedd, but no pregnancies resulted.
Only 19 Pacific white-sided dolphins live in four North American facilities. Eight are fairly recent captive-born animals, but the rest are older wild-caught animals, including the Shedd's four females, all in their 20s. Because a captive population of that size can't sustain itself and grow, the four institutions keeping the dolphins are considering several options to make the population more viable. They could collect more animals from the wild but seem intent for the time being to try other options, either bringing in animals from foreign collections or collecting semen from overseas animals for artificial insemination. The Shedd has never had a successful dolphin birth. It has had four adults die since it first brought them here in the early 1990s. Its only two pregnancies, both the result of artificial insemination, failed. One calf was stillborn; the other died a few days after birth.
Judith Scott, Marine Connections Campaigns Officer comments: “Although we are saddened by the death of this dolphin we believe that life in captivity for these sentient creatures must be insufferable. The aquariums statistics on its success at breeding Pacific white-sided dolphins and the death of four adults since the early 1990’s illustrates how inappropriate it is to keep these animals in captivity. Pacific white-sided dolphins are extremely gregarious, often traveling in groups of several hundred, even thousands of animals and they are not considered endangered therefore the charity does not believe there is any justification for trying to breed them in captivity.”
|
