Denver Museum of Nature and Science - Orcas exhibit
A museum and exhibit you should visit
Denver Museum of Nature and Science currently has an absolutely fascinating, traveling exhibit about Orcas.
DMNS usually has one or two traveling exhibits up on the third floor. Right now (summer 2024), they’ve got Orcas: Our Shared Future and The Power of Poison. I got to see Orcas.
This is a great exhibit. It weaves together three strands:
- Native American views and beliefs about Orcas
- What’s known scientifically about Orcas
- What’s known about Orca culture
A lot of DMNS traveling exhibits try to combine two different topics that have some overlap or commonality, like the 2016 exhibit, Mummies: New Secrets from the Tombs, that tried to put together some Peruvian burial customs with burial customs of the Egyptian classical civilization, or the exhibit that tried to smash together mythical creatures and reality.
I think that Orcas somehow succeeds in pulling together fairly disparate threads where a lot of the previous combination exhibits failed. I was especially impressed by the emphasis on Orca culture. Apparently Orcas live in matrilineal pods. The sounds Orcas make are greatly influenced by which “nation” they live in, and by who their mother is. They seem to mourn their dead, and avoid places where Orcas have been massacred by humans in the past. They teach each other how to hunt, and most interesting of all, they help each other in childbirth.
I am adding Orcas, and maybe all whales, in the “person” category. Whales, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and elephants at least should be legally and ethically considered to be people, with rights, and protections. It’s pretty clear that all of these groups share cognition, some form of language, self-awareness and the ability to feel. Homo sapiens makes a big mistake treating these groups as animals to be subjugated and exploited.
The only flaw in this exhibit: the penny squashing machine in the museum lobby does not have an Orca die to imprint a new squashed penny.