Phoenix, the North Atlantic Right Whale
2008
A whale the length of a bus hangs in the air above the Ocean Hall, diving gently toward you with her tail raised. She is about fourteen metres long and is not a generic whale but a portrait of a particular animal: Phoenix, a North Atlantic right whale first seen as a calf off the coast of Georgia in 1987 and tracked by scientists ever since. The model reproduces her exact markings, including the rough white patches of skin on her head, called callosities, whose pattern is as individual as a fingerprint and is how researchers recognise her at sea.
The model was built for the opening of the hall in 2008 from a steel frame and foam, finished with a painted skin, and the sculptors worked from hundreds of photographs supplied by whale researchers. Look at the head: right whales have a huge arched mouth lined with baleen plates, which they use to strain tiny animals from the water as they swim slowly with their mouths open. Look also at the scars on her body, which are real. Phoenix carries the marks of an entanglement in fishing gear in 1997, and a scar on her tail from a ship strike, both of which are reproduced on the model. The name Phoenix was given because she survived those injuries.
North Atlantic right whales are among the most endangered large animals on Earth, with fewer than four hundred surviving, and the model was chosen to make that story personal. The hall around her is the museum's largest, holding a giant squid, a coral reef aquarium, and a mirror-backed alcove of deep-sea creatures. Stand directly beneath the whale and look up, and you will see the pale belly and the notch at the centre of her flukes. Phoenix herself was still being sighted in the wild years after the hall opened, and has had several calves.
Did You Know? The model reproduces the scars of a real whale, including marks from a fishing-gear entanglement in 1997 that gave her the name Phoenix.
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