Why a dolphin pregnancy has the Shedd holding its breath

Usually, the Phelps Auditorium at Shedd Aquarium shows “Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure,” a film said to be rendered in 4D, the technology that, apparently, turns 3D up to 11. But the audience this particular winter morning, ahead of aquarium opening hours, is Shedd employees, and the meeting’s purpose is to deliver what the email invitation promised would be “a special announcement from the Marine Mammals team!”

The exclamation point is not hyperbole.

After some introductory remarks by aquarium CEO Ted Beattie, executive vice president of animal care Tim Binder puts a video up on the theater’s screen.

It is anything but 4D, but it still draws a kind of collective “Awww” from the workers.

The A-shaped image, in grainy black and white, with identifying text around the perimeter and a not entirely legible mass moving in the center — are those fins? — can only be a sonogram.

“Any guesses?” Binder says. “Yes, you are seeing the ultrasound of a dolphin calf. Piquet is pregnant.”

The cheers are loud.

Any pregnancy in a zoo or aquarium is very big news. Perpetuating the species is one of the enterprise’s main points. But having the 27-year-old Pacific white-sided dolphin Piquet (“pee-KET”) in a family way, expected to deliver in June, is especially big.

Although they are abundant in the wild, the captive population of Lagenorhynchus obliquidens is tiny: just 17 animals at four accredited North American institutions. This compares with some 200 of the larger, much more familiar common bottlenose dolphins at facilities on this continent. The prospect of adding even one more animal to the population is huge, especially because, as an open-water species, “lags,” as they are commonly known, are rarely studied in the wild.

“There are so few that we’re working with that you don’t gain the same knowledge at the same rate as with bottlenose dolphins,” says Binder, talking after the meeting in a Shedd restaurant.

Plus, Shedd had a hard time starting its breeding program with the dolphins. The aquarium began keeping the species in 1991. They were a good match for the Pacific Northwest theme of the institution’s new, lakefront oceanarium, and Brookfield Zoo, about 15 miles to the west, has had bottlenoses for more than half a century.

Although not as familiar to visitors — many initially wonder if a lag is a baby killer whale — lags are special animals, say those who work with them.

“They’re a smaller dolphin, probably a little faster than the bottlenose, fairly athletic,” says Martin Haulena, head veterinarian at the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Center. “In general, they’re a little more fiery than a bottlenose dolphin, I think. To me that makes them more interesting.”

“They’re such a gregarious animal,” says Lisa Takaki, senior director of Shedd’s marine mammal department, who has worked with the aquarium’s lags since even before their habitat was ready. “They’re really a cool species.”

Bottlenose dolphins tend to live in coastal waters, where there are more potential threats, Takaki says, and are therefore more cautious about an addition to their environment, such as a new toy.

“Whereas the lags would mob it,” she says. “They would be talking the whole time. I just think they’re super playful and exuberant.”

It wasn’t until Piquet’s first pregnancy, resulting in the male Sagu, that Shedd had a successful lag birth. Sagu is now almost 3, active and healthy.

But the first four Pacific white-sided dolphin pregnancies at Shedd resulted in two stillbirths and two calves that died within days of their birth. This is not uncommon, experts say, for dolphins in captivity and in the wild, and it is said to be more likely in first-time mothers.

“From my point of view, being a young trainer, seeing the first one not succeed was just heartbreaking,” Takaki recalls. “But it was the reality.”

When dolphins are born, the first milestone is surfacing for that initial breath of oxygen. After that, a key element of the calf’s survival is how quickly it can begin nursing and whether it is able to “slipstream,” a behavior involving swimming near its mother that lets it save crucial amounts of energy.

“If they don’t get to slipstreaming right away, that calf starts burning a lot of energy very quickly, and if they don’t get to nursing right away, then they’re not replenishing that energy,” says Binder. “Those are two things that have to happen really really quickly. If it doesn’t happen in the first day or two, it’s really concerning.”

And potentially deadly. Both of the Shedd lag calves that died very young had trouble nursing. In December, Brookfield Zoo lost two newborn bottlenose dolphin calves born to first-time mothers, one shortly after birth, one after seven days. A year earlier, keepers at the west suburban facility had to step in and raise another dolphin calf by hand after the mother failed to do her job. That calf, as well as another born in December, is doing well.

“We are very much connected throughout all of the marine mammal community,” says Binder. “When they had their calf that they hand raised, they asked us if we’d come out and just bring a different eye. So a couple of staff went out, spent some time with them, gave them some observations.

“It’s a very collegial thing. But it is difficult to see organizations have successful births only to have complications after the birth. Our hearts go out to them.”

But such losses don’t deter the staff from trying again. The Shedd continues to participate in research involving attempts to artificially inseminate lags, staffers said; two of the first four pregnancies there were from artificial insemination.

The aquarium now has another female on breeding loan at Miami Seaquarium, where both of Piquet’s calves were sired by the male Lii. Lag breeding typically occurs around early June, and gestation is 12 months.

With Piquet’s second pregnancy, Shedd staff are optimistic because she did so well the first time around, but it is a cautious optimism. Dolphin pregnancies are spoken of in the conditional, with terms such as “if everything goes well.”

Here is Maris Muzzy, manager of cetaceans and sea lions, giving the staff more detail at the town hall meeting announcing the pregnancy:

“I started with Piquet in 1993. She was just a youngster. It’s a great privilege for me to be able to watch her grow up. Now she’s become a mother. She had Sagu, one successful calf, and now, if everything goes well, hopefully, we will have another calf this summer.”

But it may not come at a time convenient for human vacation planning.

“I just want to add one more thing so you guys are all aware,” Muzzy says. “Three of Lii’s calves, including Sagu, were born on Memorial Day weekend.”

Now, about a month after that announcement, Piquet’s trainer holds up the blue-and-green bowtie shape that, like a whistle, summons Piquet to the trainer holding it.

The animal rolls over and presents her belly to veterinarian Dr. Lisa Naples, a training behavior that dolphins, male and female, go through every day.

Naples presses a wand against the animal and looks at the resulting image, shades of gray, with ribs clearly visible, on the screen of a portable ultrasound machine.

“I’m looking at the heart rate, how strong it is,” Naples says, before the trainer has the dolphin roll and present another angle. The animals sit there for several minutes.

Piquet is going through weekly ultrasounds to monitor the developing calf. (At the meeting, a staffer let it slip that it appears to be a male.) Blood is drawn monthly to check her body chemistry, more frequently if trainers detect behavioral changes. They must look keenly; as a defense mechanism, wild animals try to hide any illness or weakness.

And then there is a sort of motherhood training. “We know she has those natural mothering instincts, so that’s a big load off of our mind,” Takaki says. “But we’re still going through the training of showing her a puppet or having her swim along on her side and nudging her like a calf would. Just so it’s like that memory: ‘Oh, yeah, that means nursing.’

“For her first pregnancy we had this puppet of a dolphin head, sort of, and we put it on a stick. We desensitized her to it and then we would mouth her everywhere so she wouldn’t be scared and run away” when her calf tried to locate her mammary slits.

Piquet continues to be part of the aquarium’s regular dolphin shows, and, although staff will gradually simplify the range of behaviors she is asked to perform, she’ll take part until her interest or abilities flag.

“We let her tell us,” Takaki says. “Usually she’ll stop on her own, and we’ll go, ‘OK, it’s time.'”

In addition to keeping up with the animal’s training — they even teach a behavior that would allow staff to pump breast milk from Piquet — the aquarium trains its staff.

“We hold seminars that prepare everyone for everything that could possibly happen,” says Takaki. “If we need to increase that filtration system or if we need to heat up the water or if we need to intervene with these animals. So everyone has it in the back of the head, ‘This is the plan, we’re kicking into this plan.’

“We always prepare for the worst case scenario, and we hold practices where the team has to dive or move animals from one habitat to another. It’s just what we do to prepare for any birth. So all of that will happen in the next two months for sure — and then we wait and watch and worry.”

It will be, needless to say, a water birth. In mid-April or so, Piquet will move full time into Secluded Bay, the southernmost of its oceanarium tanks, the one where beluga whales are most commonly found. Staff will set up a full-time observation station at the tank’s underwater viewing area and start recording her behavior every single minute: swimming speed and depth, breaths per minute, any of the “crunching” behavior that is typical in labor.

“We just keep close watch on her, because if there is anything unusual, we train our staff and they call us,” Takaki says.

And if everything proceeds as is hoped, aquarium workers will witness a scene like the one captured on video on Memorial Day weekend, 2012.

As Piquet swam around the Secluded Bay tank, a small tail fin slowly emerged from her underside. She undulated her body as she swam, rolled over and did the same while upside down. Piquet disappeared behind a rock in the habitat, and then the next frame you see, the male calf now known as Sagu is swimming beside her, its dorsal fin still floppy.

“We had our leadership there, animal care, veterinary staff, some of our trustees,” Takaki recalls. “My gosh, the excitement was unbelievable when that baby came out. It was deafening, the cheers, when he immediately shot up and took his first breath.”

sajohnson@tribpub.com

Twitter @StevenKJohnson