>>NARRATOR: What color is a blue whale?
Is that a trick question? Or is the answer as easy as it sounds? Let’s start at the beginning...
The first person to refer to a “blue whale” is Herman Melville in 1851.
In Chapter 32 of Moby Dick, the sailor Ishmael reels off a list of
“half-fabulous whales”: “the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale.”
The ocean giant makes one other brief appearance in the novel,
but this time, under a name sailors and scientists generally used at the time: Sulfur-Bottom Whale.
So, is the blue whale blue? yellow-bellied?
The world’s largest animal was a cryptic character even to those who knew the sea best.
And for more than a century, the Museum’s model whales have mirrored that mystery.
[MUSIC]
>>MELANIE STIASSNY: We tend to think that all the action’s on land. You know,
that’s where the daffodils are. That’s where the monkeys are.
When we stand on land and we look out at the sea, you know, it’s just this
flat blue thing. But in fact, the open ocean is really the largest biome on our planet.
So, you don’t come across blue whales very often.
And there’s still a tremendous amount that we don’t know about them.
>>NARRATOR: For many years, the blue whale was known as the sulphur-bottom whale
because of a yellowish algae that sometimes clings to the whales’ skin.
But in the years after Moby Dick, the blue whale came to be known as the blue whale because, well…
>>STEPHEN QUINN: A blue whale is so named
because of the fact that it is blue in nature. That’s one of the characteristic field marks.
>>NARRATOR: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the vast majority of people who
saw whales in nature were whalers. These were not whale watchers, but whale hunters.
For hundreds of years before, whalers knew their prey intimately. They killed for oil
and baleen—the stiff, fringed plates hanging from the upper jaw of some whales.
The whalers’ main targets? Right whales,
bowheads, and sperm whales—slower swimmers who would float when harpooned.
But blue whales dive deep and swim fast—up to 30 miles an hour fast—faster
than wind-powered ships could chase them. So, when Moby Dick was written, blues had largely
escaped the harpoon. Even if whalers had managed to find their mark, without steam-powered winches,
they could never have hauled a 100-ton blue whale carcass from the deep.
That all changed in the 1870s with Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn. Like Melville’s Captain Ahab,
Captain Foyn was on the hunt for a near-mythic
creature—in his case, not for revenge, but for profit.
He mounted an explosive harpoon gun on the bow of a steam-powered ship,
and the blue whale had met its match.
Only about 30 years later,
the American Museum of Natural History constructed its first blue whale model.
The dimensions and features were based on a dead whale,
hauled into a Newfoundland port by a whaling ship.
>>QUINN: Its pose was less than inspiring. in that it really appeared like a giant knockwurst.
It was painted a battleship grey. Not
really reflecting the color of an actual, living blue whale.
>>NARRATOR: Contemporary critics were more complimentary,
although during construction, visitors did ask why the Museum was building a submarine.
Still, they were fascinated—only a small number of people had ever seen
the world’s largest animal in person, and this model was as close as they would get.
Ironically, there might have been a bit of blue whale blubber on their own kitchen shelves.
Margarine was one of the main products made from blue whales.
By the time technology caught up with blues, the demand for baleen and whale oil as fuel
was almost non-existent. But a demand for margarine,
soap, pet food, and nitroglycerin kept the hunt profitable.
For those four products, blue whales were almost driven to the point of extinction. From
an estimated 350,000 individuals in pre-whaling years, some 99% of the population was wiped out.
>>STIASSNY: It was really treating the ocean
as a pantry. Here’s a place where we can get our oil. Here’s a place where we can get our meat.
So, it really reflects a very different attitude to the oceans.
>>NARRATOR: When the Museum’s Hall of Ocean Life opened in 1933,
the early dioramas depicted animals that were seen as commodities—the fur seal,
pearl oysters, the sperm whale. Many were expected to go extinct in the 20th century.
And the blue whale was no exception.
>>STIASSNY: I think whales- I think whales occupy such an important place in
our culture because we have hunted them, we have used them. We’ve knocked their populations right
down. And yet, in many ways, they became the icon of conservation—Save the Whale.
>>NARRATOR: By the 1960s, the tide of public opinion was turning. Blue whales had been
granted protected status and the Museum wanted to renovate the Hall of Ocean Life, with the
world’s largest model of the world’s largest animal at its center. There was one problem…
>>QUINN: Blue whales were difficult to study, difficult to see,
and find. Back then, they were very rare.
>>STIASSNY: Amazingly, we’d actually walked on the moon before we’d seen
a live blue whale underwater.
>>NARRATOR: So, again, Museum curators and artists relied on a dead whale—this time, using
the British Museum’s measurements from a large female killed in the South Atlantic in the 1920s.
The arched diving pose was a little more accurate,
but the whale’s color left something to be desired...
>>QUINN: The basis for the coloration on that model was taken from a dead animal.
And, of course, no one knows how long the animal was dead. And there were so few accurate color
references of blue whales that the safe color to render it at that time was kind of a flat grey.
>>NARRATOR: Almost ten years later, marine biologist, explorer, and icon Sylvia Earle
was one of the first scientists who would give us a glimpse into the open ocean.
>>SYLVIA EARLE: We only, up until that time,
had mostly seen the tail or a fin or whatever. People hadn’t been in the water with them.
The pictures I’d seen, the descriptions of whales before looked like
loaves of bread. They looked like Greyhound buses. What we really wanted to do is get in the
water with the whales and observe them on their own terms, to see whales as whales see whales.
>>NARRATOR: Earle was part of a team that set out to capture
some of the earliest documentation of large, living whales in their habitat.
They went in search of humpbacks—another type of baleen whales that,
like the blues, had been hunted to near extinction and were still mysterious.
Off the coast of Hawaii, Earle and the team found what they were looking for.
>>EARLE: We were moving along in a small Zodiac rubber boat. And a group of whales we saw moving
parallel to us. And all at once, they decided they wanted to come over and see who, what we were.
When we convinced ourselves, finally,
that we really wanted to get in the water with those whales, we were just blown away.
There is no instruction book about “How do you behave? What is the proper etiquette
when you’re in the water with a whale?” Well, as it turns out, it isn’t up to us.
It’s like diving with giant swallows.
They were upside down, they were doing twirls, they were doing the most graceful ballerina style
pirouettes and swoops and it was exhilarating. We danced with them for, ah, two and a half hours.
>>NARRATOR: Earle and other scientists and explorers were at last bringing back references
to living whales. And when the Museum decided to renovate the Hall of Ocean Life in 2000,
the curators and artists finally knew what large whales looked like underwater.
>>STIASSNY: It’s really important that we were able to remodel that blue whale
with our current knowledge, our scientific knowledge, about what it really looks like.
>>NARRATOR: Steve Quinn was tasked with overseeing the blue whale’s restoration.
They wouldn’t produce a whole new creation. Instead, they would reanimate a giant.
They would use the 1960s model as raw material, shaping a living animal out of a whaler’s catch.
>>QUINN: It was based on a dead animal. And my suspicions were always that because the animal was
laying over on its side, the nose and jaws were distorted. So, we had quite a job ahead of us.
>>NARRATOR: They’d have to taper the tail flukes,
re-shape the flippers, adjust the eyes, add a belly button, anus, and even blowholes.
And of course, there was the question of paint.
>>STIASSNY: We really had to redo things—like
the color in life is so different from the color in death.
>>QUINN: ...a darker tone blue and pale patches.
And also has a little bit of the yellow, which is where the sulphur-bottom whale name comes in.
>>NARRATOR: Finally, the Museum had reference material. Researchers had
captured images of blues underwater. So, at last, this model could be truer to life.
>>QUINN: When an artist goes about undertaking the job of painting a blue whale,
there are lots of things to consider. Things that you take for granted. For instance,
when an object is underwater, it doesn’t look wet.
>>NARRATOR: Donning 25 gallons of paint, the whale now wore a new coat of color. It was science,
presented with more than a dash of awe.
>>STIASSNY: I think whales hold a very special place
in our hearts, perhaps because they’re so big.
We know they’re intelligent. We know they’re social. I think they really grasp people’s
imaginations, not just as a kind of big animal, but an animal that really represents
the wild nature still on our planet.
We hope that that will inspire people to really think a little bit more about
their impact on the oceans and how we can do something about it.
>>NARRATOR: Since the international ban on commercial whaling in 1982,
populations have made recoveries. Humpbacks have made a remarkable comeback.
There are now an estimated 135,000 swimming the oceans.
Blue whales are still considered endangered, numbering only about 5,000-15,000 worldwide.
They are still incredibly mysterious, and their habitat is still in peril.
>>EARLE: The ocean is not infinite. It is not too big to fail. It is failing. The big question—how
do we create a real awareness?
This museum, the American Museum of Natural History
and fellow institutions around the world—it’s our collective knowledge, our history.
As a kid, I remember museum experiences that inspired me
to want to go see the creatures that I could not see in my backyard, but I knew they existed.
I know that the kids who come through this institution have experiences like that. And
years later, they will look back and say, “It’s when I stood under the great blue whale
that I knew I had to go see one for myself.”
I know of no faster way to make people aware and create a feeling of
humility and respect, and to realize we’re a part
of it, not apart from it. To put ourselves in perspective—that is so worth doing.