The World of Whales : S.D. Museum Has High Hopes for New Exhibit

In an expensive gamble, the San Diego Natural History Museum has mounted a $350,000 exhibit titled “Whales: Giants of the Deep,” a traveling show originated by Seattle’s Pacific Science Center that features life-size robotic whales in simulated ocean settings.

The five models are fitted with computers and pneumatic mechanisms that re-create actual whale movements. Each cost about $200,000 to build. These showpieces have been augmented for the San Diego exhibit with fossils and artifacts from the museum’s collections, as well as slide shows and other material developed by museum researchers. The mix of spectacle and science is meant to kick off an ambitious three-year exhibition program designed by the museum’s new director, Mick Hager, who has called this first show, opening today, a major test of his plan to save the museum from the debt and other financial woes that have plagued it in recent years.

The five automatons--which represent the narwhal, killer, gray, sperm and humpback whales--have been installed on the museum’s main floor, surrounded by special lighting and sets designed to give viewers the feel of being underwater with the animals.

The whales have been painstakingly designed to resemble the living creatures--live models were used for the killer and gray whales--and they move in lifelike imitation of the way the mammals swim in the wild. The killer whale opens its huge mouth, moves its eyes and undulates its flukes. The sperm whale pursues a giant fake squid suspended in front of its mouth.

Show designers, inspired by three gray whales that were stranded in arctic ice three years ago, have installed a gray’s head emerging from a narrow gap in ice sheets, spouting from its twin nostrils and opening its mouth.

The humpback makes a wave with one of its flippers, a “game” often played by humpbacks swimming near Hawaii.

Each display also features recordings of the actual noises made by each of the five species.

While the visiting robots are the cornerstone of the show and the drawing card Hager hopes will bring in visitors, curators have wrapped the robots in a locally created package of scientific information and materials culled from the museum’s collections, turning the pneumatic beasts into entertaining teaching tools. The museum staff has also assembled a panel on San Diego’s own whaling history.

These additions were the brainchild of Hager in collaboration with guest curators Stephen Leatherwood and Bill Everett and staff paleontologist Tom Demere. Hager said the staff felt that the whales alone, while fascinating, would have been short on educational value and failed to fully engage visitors.

Both fossils and remnant bones from sculls and jaws--exhumed after 3 million years in San Diego County soils--greet visitors at the entrance to the exhibit. Accompanying texts describe the whales’ evolution, along with the digs that brought the fossils, some of the best in the world, to the museum.

In the main hall, the displays also feature interactive exhibits such as a tank filled with plastic pellets representing krill--minuscule sea animals that whales feed on. Visitors can use brushes simulating whale baleen--some species’ food-gathering organs--to attempt to catch the “food” in the way whales do.

Information placards explain where each species lives and what it eats, and also describe their habits. All the whales except the arctic-dwelling narwhal has been known to visit San Diego waters.

Hager also enlisted the help of Leatherwood, an author and associate researcher at the museum, to create video slide presentations to accompany each display.

“Let’s face it,” Leatherwood said from his office at Texas A & M University, “the whales are nicely done, but people are accustomed to sensory overload. We hope one of the things that will happen is that people will be encouraged to stop and take notice rather than just flow by them.”

Leatherwood, who created the shows with colleague Randy Reeves of Montreal’s McGill University, said the videos give a deeper explanation of species biology, habits and threats to survival.

“We try to give a balance between interesting aspects of natural history and some questions appropriate to the role of whales in a human-dominated world,” Leatherwood said. “It is an attempt to add information to the displays so that people will be both enlightened and entertained.”

Leatherwood noted other serious questions raised in the videos that are touched on only slightly in the show’s other educational materials. For example, while much of the Western world decries whale hunting, a large portion of the world sees whales as protein bonanzas. The Inuit, Indonesians, Icelanders and Japanese want to keep fishing for the huge mammals.

Is this immoral? If so, why? Whose values are at play? What are the larger implications for other natural resources?

“On what moral basis would we in the West or U.S. oppose the use of natural resources by starving people?” Leatherwood asked.

Hager promised that future shows on his schedule will plumb such issues in more depth. “We would have liked to have done more” in this show, he said, “but we did the best we could (with the time and budget) we had.”

Other parts of the show’s package include “stamping stations” for youngsters, who are encouraged to use a rubber stamp to enter each new species they see into special booklets, and suspended nets holding milk cartons and food boxes, representing the daily bread of blue whales.

An interactive display invites viewers to time how long they can hold their breath and compare that to the two hours a sperm whale can stay under water.

Sea World in San Diego also has a display at the exhibit that discusses its whale research program, an element sure to anger conservationists who have opposed the company’s hopes to collect more whales.

A panel that will be of particular interest to San Diegans explains the area’s own whaling history, dating from 1856, when Portuguese immigrants opened a shore whaling station at Ballast Point. The whalers would spot the animals, scramble into rowboats and attempt to shoot them with harpoon guns. At the time, each whale could fetch a $1,500 payoff after oil and baleen were extracted.

Curators said a final wall will remind visitors that commercial whaling is not dead and that loopholes in existing treaties permit whaling under a variety of circumstances. Two petitions, one demanding a total ban on whaling and one calling for continued whaling, will be attached to the wall.

Visitors will have the final word by signing one or the other.