Belugas in aquariums : a brief history

Follow us on a journey that will take you from the St. Lawrence to Vancouver via Russia, New York and Ottawa, to understand our history with belugas in aquariums.

St. Lawrence: source of the first captive belugas

The earliest attempts to keep belugas in aquariums date back to the 1860s in Barnum’s American Museum, in the heart of Manhattan, New York. Captured at Rivière-Ouelle and L’Isle-aux-Coudres, in the St. Lawrence Estuary, these animals would be sent by train to New York. Between 1860 and 1965, some 30 belugas were estimated to have been transported to the United States, according to the report entitled “A review of live-capture and captivity of marine mammals in Canada”, filed with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 1999.

In 1899, Fred Mather, who was the caretaker of several St. Lawrence belugas in the United States, wrote in the The Popular Science Monthly:

“In 1877 I had charge of their branch aquarium at Coney Island. At both places [The Great New York Aquarium and the branch aquarium at Coney Island] we had many white [beluga] whales at different times, for the management would keep whales penned up on the St. Lawrence River to replace those which died, and would never show more that two at a time, claiming that they were rare animals and only to be had at “enormous” expense […] It would never do to have the public know that they are common during the summer in the St. Lawrence, and when one was getting weak another would be sent down, and the public supposed that the same pair was on exhibition all the time.”

These belugas did not live more than a few months, but the river seemed like an inexhaustible source of new subjects.

The story of capturing belugas in the St. Lawrence is told in the short documentary Beluga Days (1968) by Michel Brault, Bernard Gosselin and Pierre Perrault. After a lapse of some 30 years, Perreault and his companions had persuaded former hunters of L’Isle-aux-Coudres to resume the “porpoise” hunt, which was how they called belugas back then. Hunting belugas is seen as “fun”… even more so than catching them alive for aquariums. Alexis Tremblay explains that “it’s a tradition that should be kept alive… but hey, maybe someday it will be outdated. […] You can see we’re a little behind the times.” This fisherman saw it coming: he had just sent to the New York Aquarium the last beluga to be caught in the St. Lawrence. Beluga hunting in the river was banned in 1979 and captures for export would be banned in all of Canada in 1992.