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Given my interest in whales and whaling, it has been remiss of me not to report on the most exciting recent whale project in the province, the relocation of a skeleton of a huge blue whale from PEI to Vancouver and its display at the soon-to-be-opened Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC.

It has been more than two decades since the corpse of an adult female blue whale washed ashore near Tignish, PEI. The giant body (80,000 kg in weight) was towed off the beach and buried while scientists thought about what to do with it. Finally, three years ago, UBC got permission to move the whale. Researchers unearthed the carcass, stripped the bones of the remaining flesh and blubber and shipped the bones across the country by rail.

Reassembled, the skeleton will go on display in a glass atrium at the museum. It will be one of only twenty blue whale skeletons on display in the world and the only one in Canada.

To find out all about the blue whale project, visit the website here.

Labels: ENVIRONMENT, MUSEUMS, SCIENCE, WILDLIFE

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