The orca, also called killer whale, is a toothed whale belonging to the oceanic dolphin family, of which it is the largest member. It is the only extant species in the genus Orcinus and is recognizable by its black-and-white patterned body. A cosmopolitan species, orcas can be found in all of the world's oceans in a variety of marine environments, from Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas.
William Ronald Reid Jr. was a Haida artist whose works include jewelry, sculpture, screen-printing, and paintings. Producing over one thousand original works during his fifty-year career, Reid is regarded as one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of the late twentieth century.
Gastown is the original settlement that became the core of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and a national historic site and a neighbourhood in the northwest section of the Downtown Eastside, adjacent to Downtown Vancouver.
Paul Spong is a Canadian neuroscientist and cetologist from originally from New Zealand. He has been researching orcas in British Columbia since 1967, and is credited with increasing public awareness of whaling, through his involvement with Greenpeace.
Emily Carr University of Art + Design is a public art university located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The university's campus is located within the Great Northern Way Campus in Strathcona. The university is a co-educational institution that operates four academic faculties, the Faculty of Culture + Community, the Ian Gillespie Faculty of Design + Dynamic Media, the Audian Faculty of Art, and the Jake Kerr Faculty of Graduate Studies.
The Vancouver Aquarium is a public aquarium located in Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In addition to being a major tourist attraction for Vancouver, the aquarium is a centre for marine research, ocean literacy education, climate activism, conservation and marine animal rehabilitation.
Springer, officially named A73, is a wild orca from the Northern Resident Community of orcas, which frequents the waters off the northern part of Vancouver Island every summer. In January 2002, Springer, then a calf developmentally equivalent to a human toddler, was discovered alone and emaciated some 250 miles from the territory of her family. Experts identified Springer by her vocal calls that are specific to her family, or "pod," and by examining photographs of her eye patch. They were also able to determine where Springer's pod was currently located.
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as well as the Villa Stuck.
Michael Andrew Bigg was an English-born Canadian marine biologist who is recognized as the founder of modern research on killer whales. With his colleagues, he developed new techniques for studying killer whales and, off British Columbia and Washington, conducted the first population census of the animals anywhere in the world. Bigg's work in wildlife photo-identification enabled the longitudinal study of individual killer whales, their travel patterns, and their social relationships in the wild, and revolutionized the study of cetaceans.
Captured in 1964, Moby Doll was the first orca to survive in captivity for more than two days, and the second to be displayed in a public aquarium exhibit. The availability, for the first time, of an orca that could be studied at close quarters alive initiated pioneering research. From a recording of Moby Doll's calls, he was years later identified as a member of J Pod of the southern resident orcas.
Edward Irving "Ted" Griffin is an American former aquarium owner and entrepreneur who was the first man to ever swim with a killer whale in a public exhibition, with the whale named Namu. He is best known for capturing, performing with, and selling a number of orcas during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Alexandra Bryant Hubbard Morton is an American and Canadian marine biologist best known for her 30-year study of wild killer whales in the Broughton Archipelago in British Columbia. Since the 1990s, her work has shifted toward the study of the impact of salmon farming on Canadian wild salmon.
The Drop is a steel sculpture resembling a raindrop designed by the group of German artists known as Inges Idee, located at Bon Voyage Plaza in the Coal Harbour neighborhood of downtown Vancouver. The 65-foot (20 m) tall piece is covered with Styrofoam and blue polyurethane. According to Inges Idee, the sculpture is "an homage to the power of nature" and represents "the relationship and outlook towards the water that surrounds us". The Drop was commissioned as part of the 2009 Vancouver Convention Centre Art Project and is owned by BC Pavco.
Aerodynamic Forms in Space is a 2010 sculpture by Rodney Graham located at the Georgia Street entrance to Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada. The work was commissioned by the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The inspiration for the sculpture was photos Graham took in 1977 of misassembled toy glider parts. The sculpture depicts airplane parts abstractly placed and painted to look like balsa wood.
Gate to the Northwest Passage is a 1980 sculpture by Alan Chung Hung, located adjacent to the Vancouver Maritime Museum in Vanier Park in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The 4.6-metre (15 ft) sculpture of a square, cut and twisted "like a paper clip" to form an arch, is composed of weathered Corten steel that rusts to provide a protective layer. The work was installed in 1980 to commemorate the arrival of Captain George Vancouver in Burrard Inlet, following a competition sponsored by Parks Canada one year prior. Gate to the Northwest Passage received an adverse reaction initially, but reception has improved over time. The sculpture has been included in walking tours of the surrounding neighborhoods as a highlight of Vanier Park.
Daina Augaitis is a Canadian curator whose work focuses on contemporary art. From 1996 to 2017, she was the chief curator and associate director of the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia.
Martha Sturdy is a Canadian artist and designer. Sturdy gained international attention for her wearable sculpture in the late 1970s, which evolved into further series of sculptural home furnishings using resin, steel, brass and salvaged cedar. Sturdy’s studio has since expanded to provide custom furniture, fixtures and artworks for fashion, retail and hospitality clients including Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and Louis Vuitton.
Lance Barrett-Lennard is a Canadian biologist specializing in the behavioural ecology and population biology of Killer whales. A molecular geneticist, Barrett-Lennard uses DNA analysis to study the dispersal, mating habits, and group structure of killer whale sub-populations in the Pacific Northwest. He is best known for his research concerning the conservation of the Southern Resident killer whale sub-population. As of 2022, he is a Senior Scientist in the Cetacean Conservation Research Program at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.
Northern resident orcas, also known as northern resident killer whales (NRKW), are one of four separate, non-interbreeding communities of the exclusively fish-eating ecotype of orca in the northeast portion of the North Pacific Ocean. They live primarily off the coast of British Columbia (BC), Canada, and also travel to southeastern Alaska and northern Washington state in the United States. The northern resident population consists of three clans that consists of several pods with one or more matrilines within each pod. The northern residents are genetically distinct from the southern resident orcas and their calls are also quite distinct.
The Yukon Harbor orca capture operation was the first planned, deliberate trapping of a large group of orcas. 15 southern resident orcas were trapped by Ted Griffin and his Seattle Public Aquarium party on 15 February 1967, in Yukon Harbor on the west side of Puget Sound. The first four orcas that had been taken into captivity had been captured singly, and mostly opportunistically. Those four were named Wanda, Moby Doll, Namu, and Shamu—who was then the only surviving one. Through them, interest in orcas had escalated.
