More than 100 people signed up to speak at a special Vancouver Park Board meeting on captive cetaceans at the Vancouver Aquarium Saturday.

The meeting was called to educate park board commissioners on both sides of the debate and 133 people wanted to have their voices heard.

Some speakers were adamant that the animals should not be held captive.

“Making animals perform in public is incongruent to true rescue work,” one speaker said.

Vancouver Aquarium CEO John Nightingale said the mammals could not survive in the wild.

“We only house cetaceans that can’t live in nature,” said Nightingale. “They don’t live with us, they’re going to live in some other aquarium, or they’re dead.”

Belugas and dolphins are among the cetaceans held at the Vancouver Aquarium and the park board has the ability to ban the marine mammals from the facility. The Vancouver Aquarium had invested millions of dollars in upgrades that were approved by the park board.

“We are in the middle of a million-dollar project,” Nightingale said.

He went on to say that the city will have to reimburse the costs of the upgrades if cetaceans are phased out.

Park Board Commissioner Aaron Jasper said the city should have expected this possibility.

"It should come [as] no surprise,” he said. “It was 2006 and the Aquarium was there, part of the deliberations by a previous board, that these bylaws would be reviewed in 2015. So this is no shock. We're not wasting anybody's time."

Annelise Sorg, founder of non-profit group No Whales in Captivity said she has been pushing for a ban for a long time.

“I've been at this for so long, and this latest round of park board meetings are a result of a letter that we sent back in March" she told CTV News.

The meeting is expected to last for two to three days.

With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Alex Turner