There’s a baby boom happening at this SeaWorld.
In the last 4 weeks, the 250-acre marine mammal park in San Antonio has seen a Pacific white-sided dolphin and a Beluga whale born.
Piquet, a 36-year-old Pacific white-sided dolphin, gave birth June 26 to a 20-pound, 20 inch long female calf. Luna, a 24-year-old beluga whale, had a 130-pound male calf June 28, which clocked in at four feet long.
The babies joined three others who arrived since mid-May, including a spotted harbor seal, an endangered radiated tortoise, and a California sea lion.
“Everybody’s super excited. Babies are cute and adorable, and baby belugas and baby dolphins, you don’t see that every day,” Katie Kolodziej, SeaWorld San Antonio’s curator of zoological operations, told The Post.
“We are not doing our normal show right now, and no one cares, they just want to sit and watch the babies swim around.”
When whales and dolphins give birth, many times other females will assist, as was the case with Luna, which was impressive to watch,” Kolodziej said.
“We had two of our experienced [beluga whale] moms in the pool with her,” she explained.
“And those two girls came right in, and they got right next to the baby. And they brought him to the surface to take his first breath and then they just helped him navigate the pool. And then a short while later, they passed him back off to Luna.”
Employees are beginning to gradually introduce the infants to the facility’s pod of whales and dolphins, which includes nine other belugas and eight other Pacific white-sided dolphins.
The newborns still do not have names, which are usually given by the trainers.
“We’ll kind of come up with names that have some cute meaning or some significance. And then we narrow it down to a couple, and then that gets sent to our bosses, and then that gets sent to their bosses,” Kolodziej explained.
Staff members are “pretty confident” they know who the babies’ dads are– but will do DNA testing to be safe.
“The dad’s job is over the day they did their job.”
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