Bayworld has the biggest scientific marine mammal collection in the southern hemisphere – and it is in the top five globally.
Bracketed between a sperm whale harpooned in Algoa Bay in 1897 and another found stranded in Sedgefield this week, Bayworld’s 121-year-old Graham Ross marine mammal collection comprises 5,737 specimens and 53 whale, dolphin and seal species.
The specimens include skeletal parts, teeth, squid beaks, fish ears, skin, stomach and reproductive tissue, marine parasites and other weird and wonderful items.
Summing up the strength of the collection at the recent fifth Marine Mammal Colloquium, Bayworld marine mammal curator Dr Greg Hofmeyr said it was bigger than similar resources at SA’s national Iziko Museum in Cape Town, the South Australia Museum, the California Academy of Sciences and even London’s Natural History Museum.
It was of a similar size to the one at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and was dwarfed only by the collection at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, he said.
“It’s a fantastic window on the ocean and an international treasure,” he said.
Bayworld received regular requests from marine biologists from all over the world for permission to access certain specimens for their studies and in 2017 alone it had received 21 loan applications in this regard.
“These loans are made on a partnership basis so the agreement is that they must send us a copy of their publication. It benefits marine science and conservation.”
The collection was initially started for display purposes and it gained momentum under Frederick Fitzsimons, director of the then Port Elizabeth Museum from 1906-1936.
But in his tenure as marine mammalogist from 1968-89, Dr Graham Ross took the collection to another level, organising it scientifically for the first time, and making it available for research.
Besides the material collected locally, an exchange system was started with other museums around the world and among the specimens that was acquired in this way, an unusual Amazon River dolphin arrived from the Smithsonian.
Ross and later curators foraged far and wide.
Dr Vic Cockcroft brought back dugong specimens from East Africa and Hofmeyr brought back 500 specimens, mostly of seals, from the islands of the Southern Ocean.
During a tour of the collection on Friday, guided by Hofmeyr, we got a sense of its sheer size and diversity.
Along one wall upstairs was a group of skeletons of beaked whales – rare, deep-diving animals about which little was known except for what had been gleaned from stranded carcasses.
There were 22 species of beaked whales in museum collections globally and Bayworld had nine of them, he said. These included a strap-toothed beaked whale which was thought to use its bizarre tusks in mating tussles, and its small mouth and muscular tongue like a straw to suck in squid.
Downstairs, in five storerooms equipped with dehumidifiers to eliminate damp and help keep specimens intact, and fans to reduce the smell of formalin, shelves of labelled boxes and bottles were racked from floor to ceiling.
Linking all the specimens, Hofmeyr explained, was their role in explaining the workings of the ocean.
The skull of an Antarctic leopard seal displayed ferocious incisors just right for hunting penguins but also cleverly “latticed” to allow it to gulp in tiny prawns called krill and swish out excess water.
We admired a fossilised “type specimen”, the first example of the species found, of a long-extinct beaked whale, and then passed on to squid beaks and otoliths.
These mouth parts of squid and the ears of fish were revered in marine science because they were species-specific and robust enough to survive digestion. Extracted from a predator’s gut, they revealed its diet and a host of related information, Hofmeyr said.
He said residents of Nelson Mandela Bay should be hugely proud of Bayworld’s marine mammal collection.
Public tours of the collection can be organised by calling Bayworld at (041) 584-0650 or 071-724-2122