Two Sharks, Two Belugas & One Cause of Death: Captivity

Toothless and Carlos, the two reef sharks held in aquarium stores in Ontario that we worked tirelessly to help, are both now gone. So are Peekachu and Rain, two belugas recently transferred from Marineland. The animals were different; the facilities were different, but underneath all four deaths sits the same problem, captivity.

Toothless and Carlos

Toothless, the whitetip reef shark who inspired our campaign, spent about a decade alone in an eight-foot tank at Big Al's Aquarium in Ottawa. In the wild, whitetip reef sharks live in social groups and travel across kilometers of reef each day.

AEL Advocacy filed a formal complaint under provincial law in November 2024 and ran a public campaign asking the store to relocate him. Big Al's cooperated. After more than a year of outreach, permits, and logistics, Toothless was moved to a facility in Nashville. He spent over two months in his quarantine tank, which was in and of itself a much larger environment. He was reportedly eating well and thriving – until he died unexpectedly in May 2026. We waited months for the necropsy results we were promised. Despite repeated follow ups, the Nashville facility has since gone silent, and we no longer expect those results to come.

After Toothless left, Carlos, a blacktip reef shark, was the last shark remaining in a Big Al's store. He also died, while still at the Mississauga location. We were told that he briefly escaped his tank, was quickly returned, but he did not survive the following night. We already lined up a larger facility in Quebec to take him, and the relocation plan was in motion; he just didn't survive to experience it.

Sustained advocacy, paired with the franchise's cooperation, led to a corporate commitment to stop housing large predatory shark species in its retail stores. Today, no shark remains in the franchise's care.

Peekachu and Rain

The same pattern shows up in Peekachu and Rain’s story, two belugas who died shortly after being moved from Marineland in Niagara Falls. Peekachu was twenty-three and had spent her entire life at Marineland before being shipped to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, part of the mass relocation of Marineland's remaining whales. She arrived on August 13, was found dehydrated, and died less than two weeks later. Eight days after that, Rain, a twenty-year-old beluga who had arrived at Shedd in the same mid-August transfer, died too. Animal Justice has called on federal Fisheries Minister, Joanne Thompson, to investigate whether the pre-transport health assessments were done properly.

The circumstances around these two cases differ sharply from the sharks. Marineland spent years fighting the basic terms of Canada's 2019 captivity ban rather than planning for it. Big Al's chose to act once the problem was raised. But in both cases, the real harm was done long before anyone tried to fix it: by the tank, the pool, and the years of confinement that came before any rescue effort. In both cases, the animals were simply moved from one form of exploitation to another. No true seaside sanctuary exists with the capacity to take in marine animals like these, so the options on the table were limited from the start.

The Deeper Problem

Long-term captivity does damage that can outlast the tank. Bodies and social needs built for open water or open reef don't recover cleanly, even once the confinement ends.

Getting an animal into a better environment is still usually the right call, and it doesn't erase what came before. Staying in place doesn't guarantee an animal's safety either. That instinct is exactly the reasoning certain facilities use to justify leaving animals in inadequate conditions indefinitely. Lucy the elephant, isolated for decades at the Edmonton Valley Zoo, is one of the more visible Canadian examples of that argument in action. Experts disagree over whether she is fit to travel, and she continues to suffer in the meantime.

A real health assessment and a real transition plan matter – and even in Toothless’ case, it still was not enough. 

Two Silver Linings

Big Al's commitment to stop housing sharks came about because a retailer was willing to listen. It will spare future sharks the years Toothless and Carlos spent in tanks. With Marineland's final six belugas shipped out on August 31, no whale or dolphin remains in captivity anywhere in Canada, for the first time in over six decades.

But the deeper lesson isn't about any one tank or any one facility. An eight-foot tank and a marine park pool did the same kind of damage, just on different timelines. That's what our society needs to both acknowledge and prevent.