A whale of a heart: Life-size model of a blue whale heart arrives at New Bedford Whaling Museum

By Jennette Barnes
Posted May 3, 2018 at 7:47 PM
Updated May 3, 2018 at 7:47 PM
A life-size model of a blue whale heart arrived at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on Thursday, all the way from New Zealand.
Visitors are welcome to crawl inside the heart, which has four chambers and is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
“It’s pretty spectacular,” Chief Curator Christina Connett said.
The heart is the first major element in a complete redesign of the Jacobs Family Gallery and other spaces for an exhibit titled Whales Today, which focuses on ecology and conservation. Other elements to come include a model of a whale’s head with baleen, plus life-size silhouettes of whale flukes.
The museum staff had waited for days to hear that the heart had cleared customs. Finally it was ready, and it arrived at 8:05 a.m. in a shipping container trucked from Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Everyone kept their good humor as they unscrewed the two-by-fours holding the heart in place, fetched ramps, and gingerly unloaded the pieces using a pallet jack and dolly.
“How’s your heart today?” one employee quipped to an onlooker.
The first piece was too large to fit through the museum doors. A door had to be removed to create a larger opening.
The living heart of a blue whale — the largest animal ever known to have lived — weighs nearly 1,000 pounds. The fiberglass model weighs 660 pounds and was made by Human Dynamo Workshop, a fabrication company in New Zealand whose website says, “We Make Unusual Things.”
Once both halves were inside, movers arrived to get them into the gallery. By 1:15 p.m., Connett was placing lights in the heart and arranging the signage.
Museum volunteers did a double take as they arrived.
The living heart of a blue whale — the largest animal ever known to have lived — weighs nearly 1,000 pounds. The fiberglass model weighs 660 pounds and was made by Human Dynamo Workshop, a fabrication company in New Zealand whose website says, “We Make Unusual Things.”
Once both halves were inside, movers arrived to get them into the gallery. By 1:15 p.m., Connett was placing lights in the heart and arranging the signage.
Museum volunteers did a double take as they arrived.
“Oh, my!” volunteer Judith Giusti exclaimed. The retired New Bedford teacher said the heart will be a wonderful teaching tool.
“Oh, that’s going to be incredible,” she said. “It was well worth the wait.”
It’s one thing to tell people about whales and another thing to show them, said Robert Rocha, director of education and science programs.
“Every tool we can have to explain to people how magnificent and how amazing these whales are is a good thing,” he said.
Connett has wanted to bring a model heart to the museum since before she worked there. When she was interviewing for the job at the museum a few years ago, she saw a heart like this at a traveling exhibit in New York. She looked into borrowing the heart, but it was so popular, its owners wanted it back, she said.
The Whaling Museum’s blue whale heart is a permanent exhibit — the only one in the United States.
One the goals of Whales Today is to bring attention to the status of living whales, an especially timely topic given scientists’ recent warnings that the North Atlantic right whale could be on the edge of extinction, Connett said.
“They’re really in dire straits,” she said.
Blue whales, too, are endangered. According to the website of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, the population stands at less than 10 percent of its historical level.
Follow Jennette Barnes on Twitter @jbarnesnews.
Original story here.