THE ORCA & WHITE-BEAKED DOLPHIN ROOM

The Húsavík Whale Museum is renovating its room around orcas and white-beaked dolphins. This blog will document its renovation as well as posting miscellaneous content on orcas and white-beaked dolphins.

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A Killer’s Charm

Article on killer whale research in Iceland

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In this track you can hear orcas clicking and calling from a recording made with a tag attached to one of the whales in the group using suction cups. You can also hear the sound of water flowing through the tag as the whale speeds up, giving you a real sense of being underwater with them!

Icelandic Orca Project

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Staggering underwater footage of ‘carousel feeding’ orcas of Tromsø, Norway.

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 Today we received the final prints!

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Detail of the wall paintings

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a glimpse at the first wall paintings!

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Whale researcher Dr Marianne H. Rasmussen is the head of the Húsavík Research Centre on cetaceans (Rannsóknasetur Háskóla Íslands á Húsavík). She is a leading expert on white-beaked dolphins, and she did her Ph.D. looking at certain aspects of the populations in Skjálfandi and Faxaflói bay, Iceland.

We have worked in collaboration with Marianne to create new and interesting content about both species, as she also conducts research around orcas here in Iceland.

She is holding a spectrogram of whistles from a white-beaked dolphin. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies in a sound. Whale researchers work with spectrograms to analyse and categorise the acoustic repertoire of dolphins and whales. This spectogram is directly drawn from her field work and will be present along with many more info in the room.

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Work-in-progress!

Elena Schneider is working her magic on the graphic design and the typography, making the content looking nice as well as comfortable and easy to read for the visitors of the Whale Museum!

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Very nice picture of a white-beaked dolphin swimming very close to the sea surface. Probably checking the boat and its passengers!

Picture by Andrew Stanbury 

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Yesterday (14th of August 2016) a group of about 15 orcas spotted in Skjálfandi bay!

Picture by Charla Basran

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Work in progress

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Wooden boards up and ready for the new information!

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Keiko’s ball

Keiko, the orca that starred in Free Willy, the movie from 1994, was captured from Icelandic waters in 1979, aged around 1 year-old. During his lifetime, Keiko, was mainly kept in an amusement park in Mexico city, where he suffered from the conditions of a life in captivity.

The publicity of the film Free Willy - the story of a boy freeing an orca from captivity - resulted in the creation of The Free Willy Keiko Foundation. This foundation aimed to relocate and rehabilitate Keiko, with the hope of releasing him back into the wild.

It was in 1998 after a few years of rehabilitation in Oregon, that Keiko was brought back to Iceland. He lived in a sea-pen in the Westman Islands and this big red ball was used as a toy, for him to play and interact with.

Unfortunately Keiko died a few years later, in 2003, in Norway, a year and half after being released back into the wild.

Keiko’s ball belong to the Húsavík Whale Museum collection and will be use in the display of the new room.

© Sonia Levy / Hvalasafnið á Húsavík