Cyprus was a nine-year-old male beluga. In August he left Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and travelled more than 2,500 miles in a cold-water transport unit to SeaWorld San Diego. There, according to the park, he ate steadily, settled into his new home and spent time with his trainers and with two other males from the same Canadian tanks, Xavier and Jasper. Then he stopped eating. Two days later, on the night of Sunday, Oct. 18, he died. An ultrasound, SeaWorld said, showed that his intestinal tract did not appear to be working normally and could point to a serious, life-threatening condition.
He was the sixth. Of the 30 belugas shipped out of the shuttered park this summer, to four American aquariums and one in Spain, six are now dead. That is one in five. A dolphin has died as well. As Natalie Stechyson reported for CBC News, the deaths have revived old arguments about how the animals lived at Marineland, and raised a newer one: were they ever fit to travel?
A law, and then an empty park
Marineland was once Canada’s most popular amusement park. In 2019 Parliament banned keeping whales, dolphins and porpoises for breeding or entertainment, and the park’s business model went with it. The tourism slump of the pandemic finished the job. In 2024 the park went up for sale and began moving animals out. In 2025 Ottawa refused to let it export the remaining belugas to an aquarium in China. Marineland then asked the federal government for emergency money and warned that otherwise it might have no choice but to euthanize them.
Every way out was narrow. Marine experts said release would mean certain death for animals raised in captivity. North America had no suitable seaside sanctuary, and the one proposed for Nova Scotia was still years from being built. In May the Department of Fisheries and Oceans approved a plan to divide the whales among Oceanogràfic València in Spain, Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and SeaWorld’s parks in San Diego and San Antonio. By the end of August the last whale was gone. In a June 25 letter, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had already acknowledged that “the whales are health-compromised,” according to WTTW.
A law can close a business with one vote. It cannot close the lives that business kept. Those lives go on, in tanks, until someone finds them a place to go.
What the necropsies found
Peekachu died on Aug. 25, about two weeks after she reached Chicago. Rain followed on Sept. 2, and Osiris on Sept. 21, both also at Shedd. The aquarium said the necropsies on Peekachu and Rain, and the preliminary results on Osiris, found long-standing intestinal and liver problems that had begun before the rescue. In Peekachu’s stomach were feathers, sticks and large porous rocks, objects the aquarium said she could not have swallowed at Shedd, Fox 32 reported. Flecks of what might be paint turned up in Rain’s stomach.
In València, Jelly Bean died on Sept. 17 and Echo, a dolphin, on Sept. 23. The Spanish aquarium said both had a range of health complications and organ abnormalities that may have developed before the transfer. On Oct. 9 Shedd announced that Caspian, a 27-year-old female it had been worried about for weeks, had died two days earlier after nearly four hours on life support. Her necropsy results have not been released. In September, reporting on Peekachu, Rain and Beethoven, a longtime Shedd beluga that also died, the aquarium said it had found “no evidence of a shared infectious disease or common environmental factor connecting all three deaths.”
Paint on the walls
Kristy Burgess trained animals at Marineland from 2022 to 2025. She has said before that the beluga pools badly needed repair and that the whales were eating paint peeling off the walls. She calls the deaths “heartbreaking.” She says she wishes independent experts had been given more of a say in the decisions, and that the planning, the risks and the animals’ health had been made public.
Change has to come with a realistic, carefully considered plan for the animals themselves.
Dr. Doug Whiteside, head veterinarian at the Calgary Zoo and a member of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association’s animal welfare committee, told CBC the whales were already under chronic stress, packed into crumbling pools in a “horrible situation.” Moving them added to that stress, he said, even though international rules were followed and the receiving institutions were first-rate. He called the rescue “almost kind of a Hail Mary effort.” “Is it a risk? Absolutely ... any sort of acute stress may push them over the edge,” he said. In his view, the fault goes back to a park that was never held to account and let its animals reach that state. “Right from the get-go, this sets you up for potential failure.”
The planners and the unplanned
Camille Labchuk, executive director of the Toronto-based group Animal Justice, says none of this had to happen. Her group pushed for years to move the whales to a seaside sanctuary, and she argues there was still time to plan a responsible move after 2019. “It was obvious to everyone that Marineland would one day close, because the public no longer wants to see miserable whales swim in circles in tiny tanks,” she said. A sanctuary would always have been hard, she added, “but these challenges don’t excuse the failure to plan for a better option.” She wants to know whether the animals were fit to travel and whether every precaution was taken. Some experts fear the six deaths are only the start.
Angela Fernandez, who directs the Animal Law Program at the University of Toronto’s law faculty, sees it differently. Because the animals were privately owned, she said, little was ever disclosed about their health before they left. “After years and decades in captivity, it would be surprising if they didn’t all have significant health problems.” Everyone knew some were strong and some were weak, she said, and that was no reason to leave the weak behind. “You would not evacuate an old-age home and take only the strong individuals if there is capacity to take everyone.”
Before the transport began, Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson said she had taken reasonable steps to protect the animals, including a health assessment for each one. In a statement to CBC on Wednesday, she said she remained confident in the plan and called the transfer “a significant and complex undertaking.”
SeaWorld says it will carry out a full necropsy on Cyprus and share the results with NOAA. Xavier and Jasper, it says, are stable and still adjusting. In Chicago, Shedd reports that its six remaining rescued belugas, four females and two young males, are all eating their full diets.