After Dark: Whales

Schedule

Presentations

Whale Rescue
With Ryan Berger
7:30 p.m. | Gallery 3, Webcast Studio

How do first responders rescue whales when they're tangled in fishing gear or marine debris? Join The Marine Mammal Center’s Northern Range Operations Manager and NOAA-trained entanglement responder Ryan Berger to learn how responders approach and save entangled whales. These majestic animals weigh 50,000 pounds, and responders must be at a close distance to use long poles to carefully cut and remove the lines or debris from a distressed whale before it dives or swims off.

The Wisdom of the Whale: Revelations of Postmortem Whale Study
With Dr. Pádraig Duignan
8:30 p.m.  |  Gallery 3, Webcast Studio

Break down the remarkable knowledge passed postmortem by whales with The Marine Mammal Center’s (TMMC) chief pathologist, Pádraig J. Duignan. Find out what four decades of research has taught Duignan about large whale deaths in the Bay Area and how that data can inform our understanding and conservation of the ocean and marine mammal life.

Ongoing

Whalevolution
With Cinema Arts
6:00–10:00 p.m.  |  Gallery 3

Gaze into deep time, following a possible evolution of the sperm whale from terrestrial rodent to ocean giant.

Whalevolution (Jordan Collver, 2017, 10 min.) Darwin wrote: “The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.” Illustrator Jordan Collver takes up this challenge by morphing a lineage of common whale ancestors from one to the next at a barely perceptible pace, evoking the gradual, cumulative process of evolution.

Tales After the Whales
With Cinema Arts
6:00–10:00 p.m.  |  Gallery 3

Discover the afterlife of a whale with two short films that creatively document the communal encounters of a whale’s corpse: one on land, the other in the sea.

Whale Fall (Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck, 2011, 4 min.) This handcrafted work, featuring paper puppets, charms in its telling of the surprising story of what happens after a deceased whale sinks to the ocean floor.

Back to Land (Tijana Petrovic, 2010, 4 min.) A meditation on the sight of a blue whale beached on a California shore, this film starkly observes the amassed group of onlookers and interrogates the nature of their curiosity and awe.

Golden Gate Cetacean Research
With Bill Keener
6:30–9:30 p.m.  |  Gallery 4

Get to know some of your cetacean neighbors with Bill Keener of Golden Gate Cetacean Research. Learn the results of their latest studies of the whales, dolphins, and porpoises of San Francisco Bay—plus observations about an unexpected influx of humpback whales in the Bay, how to tell a porpoise from a dolphin, and where to see either one of them in the wild. Then find out what you can do to help in the study of marine mammals.

Sharing the Science: What 3,000 Whale Watchers are Doing for Research
With Happywhale
6:30–9:30 p.m.  |  Gallery 4

Aspiring marine biologists, take note: Using the web platform Happywhale, citizen scientists and researchers have identified over 17,500 individual humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean, from Antarctica to Alaska. Find out what they’re doing and how you can get involved.