CHICAGO — The morning after Christmas in 1999, frantic keepers at the Shedd Aquarium hauled the dying young queen of their beluga-whale collection from an off-view medical pool, trying to find some way to save her.

Nothing worked, and Immiayuk died a few minutes later. Her bewildered female calf, a week shy of 5 months old, hovered alone in the medical pool, and many sobbing aquarium workers feared she, too, soon would be dead.

The calf, Kayavak, was 100 percent dependent on her mother's milk for survival and at least a year away from being weaned naturally to whole food.

Before the day was out, dozens of human handlers at the Shedd began an extraordinary effort to save her. For the next year, she had at least two human companions with her 24 hours a day, at least one of them swimming in the water with her for at least 30 minutes of every hour.

Rough reception

Kayavak (KIGH-ah-vock) over the next five years would live a life of high and sometimes-heartbreaking drama as the first human-reared beluga whale. After a long period of isolation when she was pampered by anxious human trainers trying to keep her alive, Kayavak has had to beg for acceptance as a whale.

The first time she swam into a pool with the entire Shedd beluga pod, the other animals turned on her.

"It was tough watching her get beaten up on repeatedly," said one of her human step-parents, trainer Tracey Kihnke. "But that's how whales establish hierarchy in the wild."

Kayavak — recognizable by a big, splotchy, milky white birthmark on her back — is healthy today, and the other belugas have accepted her, albeit as the lowliest individual in their pecking order.

Her survival is a shining achievement for the Shedd's Oceanarium, which has suffered the loss of several whales since the aquarium opened it in 1991 in hopes of making it into a major beluga breeding center.

First impressions

"She didn't have a mother to teach her how to be a beluga whale," said chief marine mammal trainer Ken Ramirez, the architect of Kayavak's survival plan. "I'm really proud that we were able to train her to be one."

The calf's mother, Immiayuk, one of the Shedd's first two resident whales, gave birth to Kayavak on Aug. 3, 1999. The newborn immediately impressed senior trainer Maggie Fahner.

"I thought, 'Wow! What a little spitfire she is.' She came out and started swimming all over the place right away, looking over every inch of the pool," Fahner said.

However, 1999 turned out to be the worst year in the Oceanarium's history. Another calf, weak since birth, died Aug. 25. In December, the sudden illness and death of Kayavak's mother — later attributed to a rare but deadly infection — stunned everyone.

Outside the Shedd, activists erupted into protests. Inside, Ramirez told trainers to get in the pool and give the newly orphaned baby attention, just as her mother had done.

Threat of starvation

The biggest problem was the possibility Kayavak soon would starve to death.

"We had three options we could consider to feed her," said Jeff Boehm, the Shedd's chief veterinarian.

One was to create an artificial-milk formula. The second was to pair her with another of the aquarium's mothers, Puiji, who had lost her calf four months earlier and might be able to begin lactating again.

"The third option seemed like the dark-horse solution, the least plausible, which was to let humans feed by switching her over to solid food — fish — immediately," Boehm said.

Because no adequate artificial formula has been devised for belugas, that option was dropped quickly.

"As for using Puiji as a foster mother, we didn't have confidence that she would bond with the calf, nor did we know if she could feed her at all," Boehm said.

That left the third option.

Could she feed?

Years earlier Ramirez had fed whole fish to an orphaned bottlenose dolphin nearly as young as Kayavak, and a couple of other facilities the Shedd hurriedly consulted also reported similar successes. But nobody had tried it with a whale.

"We knew if we were able to feed her fish ourselves that we could get sufficient food and hydration into her more effectively," he said. "We just weren't sure if her gastrointestinal system would be able to handle fish well enough for her to digest them."

Ramirez ordered his staff to lower the water level in the medical pool so trainers could stand and hold Kayavak while others slid frozen fish down her throat.

ZBIGNIEW BZDAK / CHICAGO TRIBUNE Chief trainer Ken Ramirez feeds Kayavak, a beluga whale, at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Kayavak lost her mother in 1999, when the calf was 5 months old.

Because she had nursed more or less constantly from her mother, the hand-feeding process was scheduled for every three hours, around the clock, lowering and raising the pool's water level each time.

"It became a labor of love," said Ramirez, who slept on the floor of his office for two weeks to take part in the early feeding.

Kayavak gradually learned to take fish from the hands of trainers.

"We filled the pool up and sat on ladders in the water so that she could swim up to us to take fish," Ramirez said. "Then we were able to get out of the water and simply hand her food from the side of the pool."

At her mother's death, Kayavak weighed 257 pounds, twice her birth weight. During her first five weeks on a fish diet, she maintained that weight. She then began to add weight steadily.

Staying up

Because of the repeated water drops in her pool during feeding times, Kayavak had to remain isolated from other whales. Trainers took up the slack as her social companions.

"We did months of overnights with her, bonding with her while we fed and played with her," Fahner said. "We were cold and exhausted, but it was for the love of this animal. They were some of the most wonderful times of my life.

"She used to get fed at 1 a.m. and then 4 a.m., and for some reason she always got very lively at 3 a.m., wanting to play. She was so much fun, a lot of us competed to get to stay overnight for that 3 a.m. play time."

With snorkels on, two trainers would swim with Kayavak, bringing along toys like cloth stars, Frisbees and inner tubes, which a trainer would sit in while Kayavak pushed it around the pool. She loved to have trainers reach in her mouth to tickle her tongue, and to get total body rubdowns by brush-wielding humans.

"She is so focused on people, it's like she's a little person," Kihnke said. "For a while, she may have actually thought she was a human."

The play and feeding eventually evolved into serious training. Kayavak learned to present various body parts to trainers for health checks and to present her tail for blood samples. She mastered "fun" behaviors, such as spitting streams of water at aquarium visitors.

Integrating Kayavak with the other whales was a gradual process beginning about a year after her mother's death. Trainers at first would put her with one adult female, either Naya or Puiji, both of whom would tolerate her for a couple of hours before turning on her.

Then she went in a pool for more extended periods with Mauyak and her male calf, Qannik, who was born a year after Kayavak.

Extremely protective of Qannik, his mother would not let Kayavak swim with them and drove her away whenever she tried to play with the young calf.

The pecking order

After Kayavak turned 3, it was time to put her with all five of the other whales at the Shedd, including the big male, Naluark. All of them, even playmate Qannik, turned on her. They chased Kayavak into an adjoining pool, biting her, beating her up, rejecting her.

Belugas determine their position in the group through dominance, with newcomers occupying the lowest place.

Dominance is established, Ramirez said, by threatening and chasing the victim with loud jaw-popping, bites and teeth rakes across the body. "Jaw-popping" is a threatening noise the whales make by repeatedly slamming their jaws tight.

For months, Kayavak swam around with skin dinged and scraped from her encounters.

"They kept her away, chasing her from whatever pool they were swimming in," said trainer Liz Deatherage, "but she would keep trying."

Finally, a trainer arrived to work at 6:30 a.m. one day to find all six whales swimming together, with Kayavak at the side of Puiji, the dominant female.

As the lowliest in the group, she still gets picked on, but the group chases have stopped, and she now can fight back.

"It took a long time for Kayavak to show any defense mechanisms for herself," Ramirez said. "Finally, now, she sometimes postures back at an aggressive animal. Those are good social skills to have in a normal beluga. We had to let her get into some scrapes to learn this."

Kayavak's success is important not just to the Shedd but also to other marine-mammal facilities.

"Right now we have 33 belugas living in U.S. and Canadian institutions," said Dave Denardo, general curator at the New York Aquarium. The belugas live in facilities stretching from New York to California and Florida to British Columbia.

"Any animal's survival is extremely important to a population this small," Denardo said.

A learning experience

"The Shedd has one of the best aggregations of (belugas) in captivity because of its good sex ratio of two males to four females, and because they have a pregnancy due next summer," he said. "They are looking the best to succeed in terms of future breeding."

The Shedd's experience with Kayavak has added to basic knowledge about social behavior and physiology of belugas, said Jay Sweeney, president of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums.

Ramirez said Kayavak now spends a lot of time with other whales, especially with Qannik, but given the choice, she will "still pick humans over another whale."

"But we don't mean everything to her anymore, like we did two years ago, when we were her only source of emotional support," he said. "There are times now when you can go out next to the pool where she's swimming with other whales, and she'll acknowledge your presence, but turn her attention back to the whales."