New residents in Sevastopol dolphinarium

Three young beluga whales were brought from Russia to Sevastopol’s Artbukhta (Artillery Bay) district dolphinarium in late February. The incomparable belugas are two females and a male named Kay. The females have not yet been given names – the coach Dmytro Sheremetiev says they will finally decide on the names by the beginning of the season. According to the sea mammal trainer Stepan Oskin, the belugas are still very young. “The females are teenagers (one is three and the other four years old), and the male, Kay, is just a toddler: he is about eighteen months old,” he says. Belugas mature at age 7-9. In the words of Sheremetiev, “in this period, the gray skin vanishes, and they become totally white.” Oskin says in turn: “Belugas belong to the narwhal family. Instead of a flipper that bottle-nosed dolphins have, they have a crest. These mammals like sleeping supine, but bottlenoses cannot do so because of the flipper.” “While bottlenoses can reach a maximum speed of 60-70 kilometers an hour, belugas can only do 20. For this reason, they are unable to perform a somersault, so habitual for bottlenoses, – at this speed, they are not strong enough to jump out of water,” Sheremetiev adds.

The sea mammal trainer claims that “belugas emit sounds at a tone range 20 times as wide as that of bottlenoses.” “Belugas are more intelligent than bottlenoses. When the belugas were brought, the dolphins were shocked at first: of course, they had scanned the neighboring pool and heard some unknown sounds. Now that the belugas are being trained, the bottlenoses swim up to the walls of their pool, sink to the bottom, and listen attentively to the sounds,” the trainer says.

The dolphinarium’s new residents met the guests in an extremely good mood, and the baby dolphin Kay posed with pleasure to the camera.