One of the most crucial parts of pulling off an unprecedented international plane ride for four beluga whales is making sure they don’t even realize that they’re on a trip. “The goal is that they notice as little as possible,” says Karina Tang, the lead veterinarian and vice president of animal health at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.
Tang and Charlie Jacobsma, the Shedd’s director of animal behavior and training, accompanied beluga whales Acadia, Lillooet, Osiris, and Sierra on the journey from their Niagara Falls enclosures to Toronto’s Pearson Airport and to Chicago. Two additional belugas joined the flight on a chartered Boeing 777 freighter but were then transported to an aquarium in San Antonio.
The whales had been living in Marineland of Niagara Falls, a notorious, long-running aquarium and amusement park that went bankrupt after the death of its owners and closed to the public in 2024. As it ran out of money to care for the animals, the park had previously implored the Canadian government for assistance. In 2025, Marineland announced that it had made the “devastating decision” to consider euthanasia if it could not relocate the animals.
At that point, the wider aquarium and marine biology world was already discussing what could be done; by January 2026, members of the rescue team were flying to Ontario to assess how they’d transport the belugas. In June, Canada reached an agreement with Marineland to allow this rehoming process, in which animals may go to a consortium of aquariums in Georgia, San Diego, and Spain, in addition to the whales already transferred to Chicago and Texas institutions. It was an unprecedented mission. “People have moved belugas before,” Tang says. “But something of this scale had not been done.”
It all went about as smoothly as moving thousand-plus-pound water-dwelling mammals hundreds of miles could have gone: “Beautiful, nice, slow takeoff and a nice easy landing,” Jacobsma tells WIRED. The team was able to stay close to the whales, constantly monitoring them and “pouring water on their backs, making sure that they were comfortable.”
A few days after the transport, on a sunny Friday afternoon, visitors to the Shedd’s Oceanarium section are greeted with signs asking for quiet. “Please keep voices low,” they read. “Help the rescued belugas acclimate to their new home.” WIRED peeked into a secluded habitat, which is under round-the-clock surveillance by veterinarians and other marine life experts, where Acadia, Lillooet, Osiris, and Sierra are currently being kept out of sight of the public so their new stewards can focus on settling them into their new home.
All female adults in their twenties, the quartet swam through the enclosure displaying the species’ signature slow and graceful dives and twirls. They gave no indication that just about 72 hours beforehand they’d each been hoisted up in a custom stretcher, placed on a truck bed in individual transport boxes filled with cold saltwater, driven to an airport, boarded on a jet, and flown to a city in a new country hundreds of miles from the ocean. To achieve the first leg of this mission, the consortium inventoried “every stretcher, every pole, every resource we had,” Tang says. “It is a logistical marvel.”
“I can't emphasize enough how the border crossing makes everything just that much harder,” Tang says. The mission worked with a variety of government agencies, including the Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the United States Department of Agriculture, and adhered to an international treaty governing international animal trade.
In addition to puzzling over logistics, the team weighed how to separate the animals, and where it would be best to send them, looking at their social groups in Marineland and considering how they’d fit in with resident belugas at other aquariums. (The Shedd already had eight belugas, for example.) The assessments could get pretty granular, agonizing over where to place a juvenile to best allow them to flourish, or which whale might serve as a leader for a newly-established pod. “There’s sub-social groups within groups, right? It's kind of like how you’ll have a friend group, but then you have one friend that you might be a little bit closer to than another,” Jacobsma says. “We really looked at that level of detail to figure it out.”
The Shedd staff were touched by the outpouring of support as they transported the whales. “That goes from the staff up at Marineland to the customs agents at O'Hare that walked onto the plane to check our passports so that we could be with the animals the entire time,” Jacobsma says.
That said, the mission has not been without critics, who are calling on more transparency and the end of captive breeding. There were limited options for Marineland’s beluga population; Fisheries and Oceans Canada told Canadian news outlets that the animals could not survive in the wild, and the Shedd says it can provide the highest level of care and that it is not focused on breeding right now. While there is a movement to create more sea pens to retire captive whales, only one exists, in Iceland, and it recently posted on Instagram that it is not in a position to accept more animals. The Whale Sanctuary Project, a Canadian nonprofit, says it is planning to open a sea pen in Nova Scotia in 2027 and has expressed criticism of this effort, calling it a “so-called ‘rescue’ situation.”
Jacobsma says the Shedd team is “cautiously optimistic” about how the animals are settling in. They’re exhibiting promising behavior, eating regularly and “foraging” for fish and enrichment toys that the team puts in their habitat. And Tang says this may only be the beginning. Marineland still holds dozens of stranded animals, and the Shedd is open to taking more, Tang says: “Up to 10 belugas.”
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