Water Birth

Welcome a 162 pound, 5-foot-4-inch baby boy, born on Monday to Puiji, a beluga whale at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. He was a breech birth (that’s head-first, for a whale), but popped right to the surface for his first breath anyway. He got the hang of surfacing to breathe pretty quickly, but his swimming still needs work. As a rule, baby cetaceans are pretty floppy creatures (their bodies have to fold in half to fit inside the uterus – see the image below from Etnier, et al. 2008), but his tail should stiffen up in a few weeks and make him a far more efficient swimmer. 

Reference: Etnier, S. A., W. A. McLellan, J. Blum and D. A. Pabst 2008. Ontogenetic changes in the structural stiffness of the tailstock of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). J. exp. Biol. 211: 3205-3213.