Arrival of the Titan

It took almost every imaginable form of land and sea transport-- trains, ferries, flat bed trucks and even cranes--but the 25-metre long skeleton of a blue whale arrived at UBC this week, set to become the centrepiece exhibit at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.

Crews spent a full afternoon unloading the titanic specimen, which will join a collection that features more than two million plant, insect, fish, vertebrate and fossil specimens showcasing BC's natural history. Originally beached on the coast of PEI, it will be the world's largest skeleton suspended without external support, and one of only six similar exhibits in North America. "Visitors will be amazed by the blue whale’s size," says Wayne Maddison, museum director and a professor with the departments of Botany and Zoology. "More importantly, the whale will help us tell the story of biodiversity to the public--how the earth's species are interconnected ecologically and genetically."

Maddison, Andrew Trites, the Director of UBC's Marine Mammal Research Unit who led the blue whale project, and Mike deRoos, the master articulator responsible for piecing the specimen back together, were all on hand to witness the arrival of the exhibit.

"Blue whales are the biggest animal to ever live on Earth, bigger than any dinosaurs. Yet we know surprising little about them," says Trites. "When the whale was exhumed, we were surprised to find that most of its skin, blubber and muscle remained intact after being buried for 20 years."

While the condition of the whale presented substantially more work in skeleton preparation, it also provided a rare opportunity to examine the bone structure of the whale's flipper.

"Most blue whale skeletons unearthed so far had been heavily decomposed, so reconstruction of the flipper--which consists of 34 bones and is the most complex structure in a whale's skeletal system — has been a bit of a guessing game," says Trites.

With its skin fully intact, Trites and his team were able to perform the first-ever x-ray on a blue whale flipper and use it as a roadmap to reconstructing the exhibit. The UBC blue whale display will therefore be the most accurately assembled in the world.

Trites and Pierre-Yves Daoust, a wild-life pathology professor at University of PEI’s Atlantic Veterinary College and part of the exhumation team, also conducted a CSI-like investigation on the whale’s heavily damaged skull--which has since been replaced with a replica made with fibre glass and plasti-paste.

Even in its untimely death, the blue whale is teaching visitors a valuable lesson: the interconnectedness of all living forms on earth, which happens to be the central theme of the museum and the Biodiversity Research Centre, a research network of more than 50 internationally renowned scientists from multiple departments at UBC.

"The current rate of species extinction is 100 to 1,000 times higher than the normal rate of extinction in earth’s history before humans became a primary contributor to extinctions," says Sally Otto, director of the Biodiversity Research Centre.

"We are losing species faster than we can document them. In other words, there are species that have existed and then disappeared on this earth that we will never get to know."

The challenge this presents is akin to piecing together an incomplete set of jigsaw puzzles, Otto explains. “We may never get a fully complete picture of our world — and how each species, from the largest animal to the tiniest microbe, contributes to that picture.”

That's why the research centre will conduct everything from curiosity-driven basic research to conservation policy assessment, answering some of the most fundamental questions while mitigating risks faced by species and ecosystems.

And that’s why the Museum must strike a fine balance between supporting research and educating the public in designing the exhibit of its collection of more than two million specimens — including the second largest fish collection in Canada.

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is scheduled to commence its school and public programming, including guided tours of select collections, laboratories and exhibits this fall.

The Museum staff aim to intrigue school children with hands-on experiments that engage all their senses. "Kids of all ages can see, smell and touch whale bones and other specimens, hear stories about their lives in the wild and how they’re connected — down to their DNA — to other living beings," says Maddison.

"They will also get a sense of what biodiversity researchers do, what sort of questions we're striving to answer, that will hopefully inspire them to be part of the solution."

Beaty Biodiversity Museum www.beatymuseum.ubc.ca