• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Dark Reason Why You Never See Narwhals In An Aquarium

September 29, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

There’s an extremely slim chance you have ever seen a narwhal in an aquarium – and for good reason. In North America, there have been only two attempts to keep narwhals in captivity, both of which ended in calamity and tragedy.

Narwhals are a truly unusual species of toothed whales that live in the icy waters of the Atlantic Arctic. Their bodies measure between 3.95 to 5.5 meters (13 to 18 feet) long, excluding the long spiraling tooth that pokes out of their head like the horn of a unicorn. Their shy and skittish nature makes them relatively difficult to study, so many aspects of their behavior remain a mystery. 

Advertisement

Not dissuaded by a challenge, the New York Aquarium in Coney Island became the first-ever aquarium to hold a narwhal In 1969. 

The young calf was called Umiak, named after the Inuit canoe commonly used to hunt the species in the High Arctic. It was captured by Inuits who said it followed their canoe back to camp after they had killed its mother for meat.

To keep Umiak company, the narwhal was put in a tank alongside a female “white whale”, presumably a beluga whale, who acted as its stepmother. Staff reportedly fed the animal with huge amounts of milk mixed with chopped clams each day, which appeared to keep it happy.

However, its stint at the aquarium was short. On October 7, 1969, less than a year after it arrived at the aquarium, Umiak died of pneumonia, as reported by The New York Times at the time.

Narwhals breach the waters surface in the wild.

A rare sight: narwhals breach the water’s surface in the wild.

Image credit: NOAA

The second attempt to keep narwhals in captivity was achieved in 1970 by Vancouver Aquarium in Canada. Their efforts started in 1968 when their ambitious director, Murray Newman, hoped that bringing narwhals to the big city could generate public interest in the elusive species and help with their conservation

As told by the Vancouver Sun newspaper, Newman and a team of sailors led by Inuit guides headed to the sea around Baffin Island in 1968 to capture a narwhal, but the two-week hunt was wholly unsuccessful. Newman returned to the area in 1970 for a three-week hunt, which was also a failure. However, they eventually managed to buy a young, male narwhal from a community of Inuit hunters in Grise Fiord.

He was called Keela Luguk after the word “qilalugaq”, the name for narwhals in some Inuktitut dialects. Within a week of the narwhal arriving at Vancouver Aquarium in August 1970, the facility also managed to capture two female narwhals and three calves, which were placed in the tank alongside Keela Luguk.

While the feat was initially lauded by the public and media, things quickly turned sour. Within less than a month, in September 1970, the three calves had died. By November, the two females also passed away. Public outrage started to mount and there were calls by the mayor of Vancouver to return Keela Luguk to the wild, which Newman batted off. 

Advertisement

Eventually, on December 26, it was reported that Keela Luguk had died too.  

The reason why narwhals don’t fare well in captivity is not perfectly clear. It’s fairly common to see their closest living relative, the beluga whale, in aquarium tanks where they appear to live (relatively) happy and long lives. 

However, it is evident that narwhals are exceptionally sensitive animals. Their iconic “tusk” is filled with 10 million nerve endings which help detect subtle changes in temperature, pressure, particle gradients, and much more. Studies have also indicated that the species is extremely sensitive to human-made noise. Even a single ship passing through their environment can be enough to radically upset their behavior. 

It’s unlikely that the world will ever see another attempt to put a narwhal in an aquarium. Recent years have seen a vast shift of public perception regarding marine mammals in captivity, namely thanks to the documentary Blackfish which exposed the practices of SeaWorld and their captive orcas. 

Advertisement

Judging by how poorly these two attempts were handled, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that the public appetite for captive whales has dried out. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Chinese envoy to U.S. urges stable commercial ties despite trade conflicts
  2. Ukraine’s crypto legislation is a step in the right direction
  3. Build The Skills To Become A Great Artist For Only $34.99!
  4. First Sighting Of Rare Pink Bird In Wisconsin In 178 Years Delights Birdwatchers

Source Link: The Dark Reason Why You Never See Narwhals In An Aquarium

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The World’s Newest Great Ape Is Also Its Rarest, With Fewer Than 800 Left In The Wild
  • IFLScience We Have Questions: Can Burying Scientists Alive In The Snow Help Us Protect Polar Bears?
  • Scientists Perplexed By 407-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Plant That Doesn’t Follow The Fibonacci Sequence
  • This Giant Goldfish Hybrid Weighs As Much As A 10-Year-Old – A Stark Warning About Dumping Pets
  • Scientists Gave Mice Neanderthal And Denisovan Genes. The Results Were Intriguing
  • 2024 Saw Higher Levels Of Carbon Dioxide In The Atmosphere Than Ever Before
  • Halloween Fireballs Will Grace Our Skies As The Taurid Meteor Showers Arrive
  • Newly Discovered Hunting Megastructures Suggest Pre-Bronze Age Societies More Sophisticated Than Previously Thought
  • What Is Spectroscopy And Why Is It So Important To Science?
  • Parkinson’s “Trigger” Seen For The First Time: Scientists Image The Toxic Molecules Inside The Human Brain
  • What Flying Animals Exist That Are Not Birds?
  • DNA Evidence Uncovers Surprising Origins Of Native Americans
  • Single Gene Swap “Transfers A Behavior” Between Two Species For The First Time
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Has A Rare “Anti-Tail”, New Observations Confirm
  • Asteroid Apophis: Animation Shows Asteroid’s Nail-Biting Close Approach To Earth In 2029
  • Titan Breaks A Key Chemistry Rule: What That Means For Alien Life
  • Scientists Studied “Chicago Rat Hole” – They Have Bad News, The South Atlantic’s Magnetic Field Weak Spot Is Growing, And Much More This Week
  • Could This Be The Real Reason Humans Survived And Neanderthals Died Out?
  • Newly Discovered Snail Species Named After Studio Ghibli Co-Founder Is A Hairy Beauty
  • 2025 SC79 Is The Second-Fastest Asteroid Ever Found – And Only The Second Within Venus’ Orbit
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version