Second whale shark dies at Ga. Aquarium

Norton, the largest whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium, was euthanized Wednesday morning, the second whale shark to die at the facility this year.

A team of specialists ended the ailing whale shark's life before sunrise. Workers reported that the 23-foot-long fish sank to the bottom of Ocean Voyager, the aquarium's largest display, about 3 a.m.
He'd been swimming erratically, and blood samples indicated he wouldn't recover, aquarium officials said.

Norton had not been eating regularly for months, prompting the aquarium to force-feed the fish with a PVC pipe. Despite his loss of appetite, aquarium workers had noticed Norton occasionally showed an interest in eating and hoped he would improve, said Ray Davis, the aquarium's senior vice president of zoological operations.

"In a sense, this caught us by surprise," he said.

The death didn't shock Naomi Rose, a marine mammal specialist at the Humane Society of the United States. A frequent critic of large aquariums, she accused aquarium benefactor Bernie Marcus and Jeff Swanagan, the aquarium's president and executive director, of "showboating to sell tickets" by having the world's largest fish on display.

"Now that two of them [whale sharks] are dead, it will be very interesting to see what happens to the other four," Rose said. "The fact remains that very little is known about whale sharks. Maybe these four will live longer; maybe they won't."

Ralph, another male whale shark, died in January. Like Norton, he drifted to the bottom of the 6.2-million-gallon tank, and efforts to revive him failed. Like Norton, he came to Atlanta in June 2005.

Like Norton, Ralph was in the tank when the aquarium treated it with a pesticide to rid it of parasites. The aquarium has refused to say what chemical its workers used. Both fishes stopped eating sometime after the chemical had been applied; the aquarium started force-feeding each.

A necropsy on Ralph showed that the 22-foot fish had died of peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdominal lining. He also had perforations in his stomach, possibly caused by the force-feedings. His stomach, veterinarians noted, also appeared to have thin walls.

The aquarium's other four whale sharks, which weren't in Ocean Voyager when workers applied the pesticide, appear well. Females Alice and Trixie, which arrived in June 2006, are eating regularly, aquarium workers say. The latest arrivals, males Taroko and Yushan, which came to the aquarium on June 1, also seem healthy. All the fishes came from Taiwan, which recently banned the capture, sale and export of whale sharks, beginning in 2008.

It's too soon to trace the chemical treatment to the whale sharks' deaths, Davis said. "It's a little early to make a correlation of these two," he said.

News of Norton's death traveled quickly among people who study Rhincodon typus. Jason Holmberg, a whale shark researcher from Portland, Ore., said he hoped the two latest arrivals to the aquarium might profit from the big fish's death.

"Now that he has perished, I hope that, with the next two, they [aquarium workers] will do a better job," he said.

The aquarium, meantime, hummed with visitors Wednesday like Maia Smith of Douglasville. She jiggled her 2-year-old son, Nasir Smith on her hip. Fishes flashed gold and silver like coins tossed in a fountain, and the little boy wiggled with excitement.
source:www.ajc.com