What Color Is a Blue Whale?
[Black and white photos of the Museum’s blue whale model.]
NARRATOR: What color is a blue whale? Is that a trick question? Or is the answer as easy as it sounds? Let’s start at the beginning...
[A hand pulls a copy of Moby Dick off a book shelf.]
NARRATOR: The first person to refer to a “blue whale” is Herman Melville in 1851.
[Close-up of the novel’s title page, showing the author’s name—Herman Melville—and the date of publication.]
[Close-up of a page in Moby Dick. Text reads “Chapter XXXII Cetology.”]
NARRATOR: In Chapter 32 of Moby Dick,
[Footage from archival fiction film shows a sailor on a ship, looking out to sea.]
NARRATOR: …the sailor Ishmael reels off a list of “half-fabulous whales”:
[Close-up of a page in Moby Dick. Text is highlighted reading, “…half-fabulous whales.”]
[Archival scientific illustrations of various whales—very inaccurate renderings compared to how whales actually appear in nature.]
NARRATOR: “the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale.”
[Archival footage of the sailor, now looking out a telescope. He sees whales spouting in the distance.]
NARRATOR: The ocean giant makes one other brief appearance in the novel, but this time, under a name sailors and scientists generally used at the time:
[Close-up of a page in Moby Dick. Text is highlighted reading “(Sulphur Bottom).”]
NARRATOR: …Sulphur-Bottom whale.
[Archival illustration of a whale in black and white.]
NARRATOR: So, is the blue whale blue?
[Blue tint appears on whale illustration.]
NARRATOR: Yellow-bellied?
[Blue tint disappears, and yellow tint appears on the underside of the illustrated whale.]
NARRATOR: The world’s largest animal was a cryptic character even to those who knew the sea best.
[Archival footage from the early 20th century shows just the back of a large whale, seen far out at sea.]
NARRATOR: And for more than a century, the Museum’s model whales have mirrored that mystery.
[Various archival images of the Museum’s whale models, as they appeared throughout the decades of the 20th century.]
[SHIMMERING MUSIC]
[Animated title with American Museum of Natural History logo. Text reads, “ICONS – What Color Is a Blue Whale?” and appears over color footage of the blue whale model in the modern-day Hall of Ocean Life.]
[Curator Melanie Stiassny speaks from the Museum collections. Shelves with numerous jars are in the background. An onscreen title identifies her as, “Melanie Stiassny, Curator, Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life.”]
MELANIE STIASSNY (Herbert R. and Evelyn Axelrod Research Curator, Department of Ichthyology, Division of Vertebrate Zoology): We tend to think that all the action’s on land. You know, that’s where the daffodils are. That’s where the monkeys are.
[Flat oceanscape, with a single small sailboat floating on the horizon, far in the distance.]
STIASSNY: I mean, when we stand on land and we look out at the sea, you know, it’s just this flat blue thing.
[Dolphins swim past the camera. An enormous school of hundreds of fish circles.]
STIASSNY: But in fact, the open ocean is really the largest biome on our planet.
[Stiassny speaks from the collections.]
STIASSNY: So, you don’t come across blue whales very often.
[A blue whale spouts at the ocean’s surface.]
STIASSNY: And there’s still a tremendous amount that we don’t know about them.
NARRATOR: For many years, the blue whale was known as the sulphur-bottom whale
[Archival scientific illustration of a blue whale. Text reads, “The Sulphur Bottom of the Pacific. Sibbaldius sulfureus, Cope. Outline from Scammon’s Marine Mammals, Plate VIII.”]
NARRATOR: …because of a yellowish algae that sometimes clings to the whales’ skin.
[Image of a blue whale’s back, covered in yellowish-spots, followed by microscopic images of the algae.]
[Archival scientific illustration of a blue whale. Text reads, “Sibbald’s Rorqual or Blue Whale.”]
NARRATOR: But in the years after Moby Dick, the blue whale came to be known as the blue whale because, well…
[Artist Stephen Quinn speaks in front of a model blue whale. Onscreen text identifies him as “Stephen Quinn, Exhibition Associate.”]
STEPHEN QUINN (Exhibition Associate): A blue whale is so named because of the fact that it is blue in nature. That’s one of the characteristic field marks.
[Archival footage from a silent film showing a large sailing ship of the kind whalers might have used in the 19th century.]
NARRATOR: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the vast majority of people who saw whales in nature were whalers.
[Archival footage from a fictional film of two sailors, one coiling rope and the other sharpening a harpoon point.]
NARRATOR: These were not whale watchers, but whale hunters.
[Various archival images showing whalers hunting whales.]
NARRATOR: For hundreds of years before, whalers knew their prey intimately. They killed for oil and baleen—
[Vintage black and white footage of a pipe-smoking man running his fingers through the baleen in a dead whale’s mouth. Another man parts the baleen and peers out from between the baleen “curtains.”]
NARRATOR: …the stiff, fringed plates hanging from the upper jaw of some whales.
[Various archival illustrations of 19th century whalers hunting whales from small boats.]
NARRATOR: The whalers’ main targets? Right whales, bowheads, and sperm whales—slower swimmers who would float when harpooned.
[Archival illustration of a dead whale, floating in the water, surrounded by whalers in rowboats.]
[Animated sequence: A bird’s eye view of a spouting blue whale swimming ahead of a sailing ship.]
NARRATOR: But blue whales dive deep and swim fast—up to 30 miles an hour fast—faster than wind-powered ships could chase them.
[Animated sequence: A whaler throws a harpoon at the whale in front of the ship, but it falls far short of the whale. The whale flips its tail and dives deep into the ocean.]
NARRATOR: So, when Moby Dick was written, blues had largely escaped the harpoon. Even if whalers had managed to find their mark, without steam-powered winches, they could never have hauled a 100-ton blue whale carcass from the deep.
[Animated sequence: Men standing on a ship’s deck heave on a rope hanging from a pulley. As we peer over the side of the ship, something heavy crashes into the ocean and throws up a huge splash.]
[SPLASH]
[Framed portrait of a bearded man. Text above the illustration reads “Kommander Svend Foyn.”]
NARRATOR: That all changed in the 1870s with Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn.
[Archival footage of two men on the prow of a ship.]
NARRATOR: Like Melville’s Captain Ahab, Captain Foyn was on the hunt for a near-mythic creature—in his case, not for revenge, but for profit.
[Archival footage of a whaling ship, two men screwing a pointed tip on a large harpoon, and a whaler manning a harpoon gun mounted on a ship.]
NARRATOR: He mounted an explosive harpoon gun on the bow of a steam-powered ship, and the blue whale had met its match.
[Archival footage of a harpoon shooting a blue whale. Ocean spray is thrown up all around and the scene is chaotic.]
[Archival image of a large wire frame sitting on the floor of a Museum gallery.]
NARRATOR: Only about 30 years later, the American Museum of Natural History constructed its first blue whale model.
[Various archival images of the model whale’s construction, and the finished model hanging in the gallery. It is large and chunky—more like a hoagie than a sleek whale.]
NARRATOR: The dimensions and features were based on a dead whale,
[Archival image of two men taking a cast of a dead whale’s mouth.]
NARRATOR: …hauled into a Newfoundland port by a whaling ship.
[Archival footage of a large whale pulled by its tail along a dock.]
[Quinn speaks in an interview.]
QUINN: Its pose was less than inspiring, in that it really appeared like a giant knockwurst.
[Archival image of the early model whale hanging in the Museum.]
QUINN: It was painted a battleship grey.
[Quinn speaks in an interview.]
QUINN: Not really reflecting the color of an actual, living blue whale.
NARRATOR: Contemporary critics were more complimentary, although during construction, visitors did ask why the Museum was building a submarine.
[Various headlines and articles from period newspapers and magazines. Highlighted text reads, “The Whale In the American Museum of Natural History—A life-like model of the Largest Living Mammal,” “PRINCE OF WHALES - …the splendid new model,” “76 FOOT WHALE AT THE MUSEUM – 66 Foot Dinosaur Will Retire To Second Place,” and “…questions as to why he is building a submarine.”]
[Archival image showing underside of blue whale model from lower gallery.]
NARRATOR: Still, they were fascinated—only a small number of people had ever seen the world’s largest animal in person, and this model was as close as they would get.
[Archival footage of a 1930s-era woman in an apron. She opens a kitchen cabinet.]
NARRATOR: Ironically, there might have been a bit of blue whale blubber on their own kitchen shelves.
[Vintage ad footage of a knife cutting into a stick of margarine.]
NARRATOR: Margarine was one of the main products made from blue whales.
[Margarine drips from fork in the vintage ad. Text reads “Good Luck Margarine. Better tasting… easier spreading.”]
[Archival footage of a man hosing down the carcass of a blue whale, distended on a dock.]
NARRATOR: By the time technology caught up with blues, the demand for baleen and whale oil as fuel was almost non-existent. But a demand for margarine, soap, pet food, and nitroglycerin kept the hunt profitable.
[A montage of images from vintage advertisements for margarine, soap, and pet food is followed by archival footage of a hand pressing down on a plunger and an explosion.]
[Vintage footage of a blue whale floundering next to the side of a whaling ship.]
NARRATOR: For those four products, blue whales were almost driven to the point of extinction. From an estimated 350,000 individuals in pre-whaling years, some 99% of the population was wiped out.
[Stiassny speaks from the collections.]
STIASSNY: It was really treating the ocean as a pantry. Here’s a place where we can get our oil. Here’s a place where we can get our meat. So, it really reflects a very different attitude to the oceans.
[Archival image of the Hall of Ocean Life under construction in the 1930s.]
NARRATOR: When the Museum’s Hall of Ocean Life opened in 1933,
[Archival map of the Museum’s floor plan. The room labeled “Ocean Life” shows an image of a man harpooning a whale.]
NARRATOR: …the early dioramas depicted animals that were seen as commodities—
[Archival image of various dioramas—a family of fur seals, a man diving for pearl oysters, and a painting of a whaling ship hunting a sperm whale.]
NARRATOR: …the fur seal, pearl oysters, the sperm whale. Many were expected to go extinct in the 20th century.
[Archival image of blue whale spouting.]
NARRATOR: And the blue whale was no exception.
[Stiassny speaks from the collections.]
STIASSNY: I think whales- I think whales occupy such an important place in our culture because we have hunted them, we have used them. We’ve knocked their populations right down. And yet, in many ways, they became the icon of conservation—Save the Whale.
[Archival images showing “Save the Whales” poster and protest.]
NARRATOR: By the 1960s, the tide of public opinion was turning.
[Page from International Whaling Commission report. Highlighted text reads, “10. Protection of the Blue Whale. Total protection of the blue whale in the North Atlantic was continued for a further five years.”]
NARRATOR: Blue whales had been granted protected status…
[Blueprints from the Museum’s renovation of the Hall of Ocean Life show a whale’s outline next to architectural features.]
NARRATOR: …and the Museum wanted to renovate the Hall of Ocean Life, with the world’s largest model of the world’s largest animal at its center. There was one problem…
[Quinn speaks in an interview.]
QUINN: Blue whales were difficult to study, difficult to see, and find.
[Flat open ocean.]
QUINN: Back then, they were very rare.
[View of the Earth from space, image of the Earth rising over the Moon’s surface, image of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon.]
STIASSNY: Amazingly, we’d actually walked on the moon before we’d seen a live blue whale underwater.
[Archival image of scale model blue whale with planning marks.]
NARRATOR: So, again, Museum curators and artists relied on a dead whale—
[Archival image of a man standing next to a large blue whale carcass.]
[Montage of pages from scientific report showing measurements of various blue whales and their body parts—e.g., “Tip of snout to tip of flipper.”]
NARRATOR: …this time, using the British Museum’s measurements from a large female killed in the South Atlantic in the 1920s.
[Archival scientific illustration of a whale. Text reads, “Fig. 1.”]
[Archival image of the blue whale model being built inside the Hall of Ocean Life. As opposed to the submarine look of the earlier model, this is much closer to what we now know whales to look like.]
NARRATOR: The arched diving pose was a little more accurate,
[Archival image of the blue whale model in black and white. Large white spots are apparent on its underbelly.]
NARRATOR: …but the whale’s color left something to be desired.
[Quinn speaks in an interview.]
QUINN: The basis for the coloration on that model was taken from a dead animal. And, of course, no one knows how long the animal was dead.
[Page from archival scientific report. Beneath an illustration of a blue whale are lines reading, “Color of sides of body. A. Dark gray, with lighter dashes. B. Grayish black. C. Grayish black. D. Grayish black. E. Grayish black. F. Grayish black, without gradations.”]
QUINN: And there were so few accurate color references of blue whales that the safe color to render it at that time was kind of a flat grey.
[Archival image of 1960s blue whale model in the Hall of Ocean Life. The whale appears the same flat grayish color as the surrounding walls.]
[Archival images of explorer Sylvia Earl underwater and in diving gear.]
NARRATOR: Almost ten years later, marine biologist, explorer, and icon Sylvia Earle was one of the first scientists who would give us a glimpse into the open ocean.
[Sylvia Earle speaks in an interview inside the Museum’s Hall of Biodiversity. Onscreen text identifies her as, “Sylvia Earle, Oceanographer.”]
SYLVIA EARLE (Oceanographer and Explorer): We only, up until that time, had mostly seen the tail or a fin or whatever.
[A whale’s back crests above the surface for a moment. It spouts and dives back down.]
[Earle speaks in an interview.]
EARLE: People hadn’t been in the water with them. The pictures I’d seen, the descriptions of whales before looked like loaves of bread.
[Animated sequence: A loaf of bread combined with the features of a whale—eyes, fins, and a tail.]
EARLE: They looked like Greyhound buses.
[Animated sequence: The loaf expands in size and now looks like a whale combined with a bus.]
EARLE: What we really wanted to do is get in the water with the whales and observe them on their own terms, to see whales as whales see whales.
[Animated sequence: The camera zooms into the bus/whale’s eye and the screen transitions into an archival photo of Earle in the field.]
NARRATOR: Earle was part of a team that set out to capture some of the earliest documentation of large, living whales in their habitat.
[Archival photographs of humpback whales underwater, taken during Earle’s early expeditions.]
[Footage of humpback whale underwater.]
NARRATOR: They went in search of humpbacks—another type of baleen whales that, like the blues, had been hunted to near extinction and were still mysterious.
[Animated sequence: From a map of Hawaii, we zoom into the ocean near the islands.]
NARRATOR: Off the coast of Hawaii, Earle and the team found what they were looking for.
[Animated sequence: Crewmembers in scuba gear ride in a small boat.]
EARLE: We were moving along in a small Zodiac rubber boat. And a group of whales we saw moving parallel to us.
[Animated sequence: Large whales emerge in the water surrounding the boat.]
EARLE: And all at once, they decided they wanted to come over and see who, what we were.
[Animated sequence: a lone female diver swims directly away from us, further into the ocean depths.]
EARLE: When we convinced ourselves, finally, that we really wanted to get in the water with those whales,
[Animated sequence: Close up on the diver’s face behind the scuba mask. A whale is reflected in the glass.]
EARLE: …we were just blown away.
[Earle speaks in an interview.]
EARLE: There is no instruction book about “How do you behave? What is the proper etiquette when you’re in the water with a whale?”
[Footage of humpback whale underwater.]
EARLE: Well, as it turns out, it isn’t up to us. It’s like diving with giant swallows.
[Animated sequence: Several whales swim gracefully across the screen, twirling and flipping, with their flippers posed almost balletically.]
EARLE: They were upside down, they were doing twirls, they were doing the most graceful ballerina style pirouettes and swoops and it was exhilarating.
[Animated sequence: Diver figure and whale “dance” next to one another in a graceful, but cartoonish version of the twist.]
EARLE: We danced with them for, ah, two and a half hours.
[Archival color images of blue whales underwater—blurry, but discernable.]
NARRATOR: Earle and other scientists and explorers were at last bringing back references to living whales.
[Archival images of 1960s whale and Hall of Ocean Life covered in scaffolding, being readied for renovation.]
NARRATOR: And when the Museum decided to renovate the Hall of Ocean Life in 2000, the curators and artists finally knew what large whales looked like underwater.
[Stiassny speaks from the collections.]
STIASSNY: It’s really important that we were able to remodel that blue whale with our current knowledge, our scientific knowledge, about what it really looks like.
[Archival images from 2000s renovation show workers and artists comparing full-sized model to scale version.]
[Archival images of Quinn working in the Hall of Ocean Life during the renovation.]
NARRATOR: Steve Quinn was tasked with overseeing the blue whale’s restoration.
[1960s whale in gutted Hall of Ocean Life, prior to reworking.]
NARRATOR: They wouldn’t produce a whole new creation.
[1960s whale surrounded by giant plastic tarps, scaffolding, and construction lights.]
NARRATOR: Instead, they would reanimate a giant.
[Various archival images showing whale covered in preparatory markings for re-sculpting.]
NARRATOR: They would use the 1960s model as raw material, shaping a living animal out of a whaler’s catch.
[Quinn speaks in an interview.]
QUINN: It was based on a dead animal. And my suspicions were always that because the animal was laying over on its side,
[Archival image of 1960s whale, showing bulging eyes and slightly distended face.]
QUINN: …the nose and jaws were distorted. So, we had quite a job ahead of us.
[Various archival images of whale re-sculpting in process.]
NARRATOR: They’d have to taper the tail flukes, re-shape the flippers, adjust the eyes, add a belly button, anus, and even blowholes. And of course, there was the question of paint.
[Stiassny speaks from the collections.]
STIASSNY: We really had to redo things—like the color in life is so different from the color in death.
[Quinn indicates sections of a blue whale skin paint sample.]
QUINN: —a darker tone blue and pale patches. And also has a little bit of the yellow, which is where the sulphur-bottom whale name comes in.
[Archival images of the blue whale scale model in the Hall, surrounded by construction materials.]
NARRATOR: Finally, the Museum had reference material.
[A blue whale swims underwater.]
NARRATOR: Researchers had captured images of blues underwater. So, at last, this model could be truer to life.
[Quinn speaks in an interview.]
QUINN: When an artist goes about undertaking the job of painting a blue whale, there are lots of things to consider. Things that you take for granted. For instance, when an object is underwater, it doesn’t look wet.
[A series of archival images taken from a similar angle gives a sort of time lapse effect as construction lifts and materials move around the blue whale model in the Hall of Ocean Life.]
NARRATOR: Donning 25 gallons of paint, the whale now wore a new coat of color. It was science, presented with more than a dash of awe.
[Drone footage of blue whale cow and calf spouting at the ocean footage.]
STIASSNY: I think whales hold a very special place in our hearts, perhaps because they’re so big.
[Stiassny speaks from the collections.]
STIASSNY: We know they’re intelligent. We know they’re social. I think they really grasp people’s imaginations, not just as a kind of big animal,
[Drone footage shows a blue whale lunge feeding on a cloud of krill near the ocean’s surface.]
STIASSNY: …but an animal that really represents the wild nature still on our planet. We hope that that will inspire people to really think a little bit more about their impact on the oceans and how we can do something about it.
[Drone footage shows a blue whale cow and calf spouting from afar.]
NARRATOR: Since the international ban on commercial whaling in 1982, populations have made recoveries.
[Humpback whale leaps out of water and splashes back down.]
NARRATOR: Humpbacks have made a remarkable comeback.
[Humpback whale swimming underwater.]
NARRATOR: There are now an estimated 135,000 swimming the oceans.
[Blue whale cow and calf surface to spout and then dive into the ocean.]
NARRATOR: Blue whales are still considered endangered, numbering only about 5,000-15,000 worldwide. They are still incredibly mysterious, and their habitat is still in peril.
[A blue whale swims underwater.]
EARLE: The ocean is not infinite. It is not too big to fail. It is failing. The big question—how do we create a real awareness?
[Earle speaks in an interview, indicates the Museum around her with her hands.]
EARLE: This museum, the American Museum of Natural History and fellow institutions around the world—it’s our collective knowledge, our history.
[Footage of the blue whale model in today’s Hall of Ocean Life is surrounded by animated colors. The whale’s eye sparkles and a cartoon version “swims” out of the ceiling and into the ocean.]
EARLE: As a kid, I remember museum experiences that inspired me to want to go see the creatures that I could not see in my backyard, but I knew they existed.
[The animated whale swims up in front of our view. Its eye twinkles and that transitions to footage of two young children running into the Hall of Ocean Life with the blue whale visible in front.]
EARLE: I know that the kids who come through this institution have experiences like that. And years later, they will look back and say, “It’s when I stood under the great blue whale that I knew I had to go see one for myself.”
[Earle speaks in an interview.]
EARLE: I know of no faster way to make people aware…
[A series of time lapse photos overlaid on one another shows the paths of visitors as they walk around the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, surrounding the whale and creating intricate patterns on the stairs and walkways.]
EARLE: …and create a feeling of humility and respect,
[Earle speaks in an interview.]
EARLE: …and to realize we’re a part of it, not apart from it. To put ourselves in perspective—that is so worth doing.
***END***
Did you know there’s been a blue whale model at the American Museum of Natural History for over 100 years?
The huge icon hanging in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life has been a visitor favorite for decades. But over time, the way we see whales has changed dramatically as a once-hunted animal became a symbol of ocean conservation. Oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Earle tells the story of filming whales underwater, and Museum staff reveal how whale models have been refined through the years as we learned more about these mysterious ocean giants.