NEW BEDFORD – The New Bedford Whaling Museum is launching a major initiative to expand and update Whales Today, its whale ecology and conservation exhibition.
The first phase of the expansion opens Thursday, September 28 as the Museum incorporates the U.S. Navy’s Stewards of the Sea: Defending Freedom, Protecting the Environment interactive exhibition.
The Museum will host an opening reception on Thursday, September 28 from 6 pm to 8 pm.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information, go to whalingmuseum.org.
Stewards of the Sea is on loan from Fleet Command and focuses on marine mammal bioacoustics research performed by the Naval Underwater Warfare Center.
The Navy’s exhibit will enhance the educational content of Whales Today along with the Museum’s William A. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings and Data.
The exhibition will also feature scientific equipment donated or loaned by the Navy and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), and other objects from the Museum’s collections.
In 2014, WHOI gifted two collections to the Whaling Museum: The William A. Watkins Collection of Marine Mammal Sound Recordings and Data and the William A. Watkins and William E. Schevill Collection of Images and Instruments.
Together, the two collections helped launch the modern whale conservation movement, and they continue to inform cetacean research and contemporary conservation policy.