Dalhousie announces plans for $12M ocean science centre | 24CA News

Dalhousie University in Halifax has unveiled plans for a brand new $12-million ocean science centre.

When it opens in 2025, the marine attraction will give the general public an opportunity to work together with species they not often see and showcase the college’s ocean-related analysis.

“My hopes for the centre are that it really provides something unique for Nova Scotia and for Nova Scotians, that it provides them with an opportunity to really understand and appreciate marine biodiversity — what it is, why it’s important, why it’s under threat,” stated Derek Tittensor, a biology professor who chairs the centre’s science committee.

The 60 deliberate displays will embody a number of aquariums, shows of species going through extinction, a climate-change sphere, a life-sized kelp forest and the 19-metre skeleton of a blue whale that washed up in East Berlin, N.S., in 2017 after it was seemingly struck by a vessel.

The 8,000-square-foot facility has been named the Beaty Marine Biodiversity Centre after British Columbia-based entrepreneur and conservationist Ross Beaty and his household, who donated $8.2 million. Dalhousie will fundraise a further $4 million.

Beaty contributed to a terrestrial-focused biodiversity centre 15 years in the past on the University of British Columbia and wished to ascertain a marine one on the East Coast.

“They’re both trying to address, in a small way, or profile the importance of the biodiversity crisis that humans find themselves in, the world finds itself in where we’re losing species at an enormous rate because of the heavy human footprint on the land and the ocean,” he informed 24CA News after the centre was introduced on Wednesday.

The undertaking is being developed in collaboration with Discovery Centre International and can change into a vacation spot for college students from Grade 6 and up, vacationers and the general public, the college stated.

It will likely be housed inside the Steele Ocean Science Building and can give the general public an opportunity to see species held within the Aquatron, Canada’s largest aquatic analysis facility, which is positioned subsequent door.

Species on brink of extinction

The Aquatron is residence to a wide range of marine life, together with warm-water guests to Nova Scotia like seahorses. It additionally homes critically endangered Atlantic Whitefish, an historical relative of Atlantic salmon getting ready to extinction.

The Dalhousie facility has extra Atlantic whitefish than exist within the wild. The world’s remaining inhabitants solely survives in three lakes behind the Town of Bridgewater.

They are actually so valuable every time juvenile Atlantic whitefish are discovered they’re whisked to Dalhousie to protect the inhabitants.

“We hope this will become part of our back of house tour as part of the Beaty Biodiversity Centre and we hope to have some Atlantic whitefish and Atlantic salmon here so we can bring the public back and tell the story about their conservation and efforts to recover them,” stated Aquatron supervisor John Batt.

Beaty stated the Atlantic Whitefish is a visual instance of what’s taking place to an enormous variety of species that the general public is unaware of.

“We see the Atlantic whitefish. We can actually measure it. We can go into a lake and understand it. We can identify ways to protect it instead of watching it go extinct under our watch,” he stated.

“It’s an example of what we don’t see, we don’t understand that we’re losing.”

Dalhousie biologist Derek Tittensor stated this form of public outreach is key to dialog efforts.

“It’s changing minds and really opening people’s eyes to the scale of what’s happening in the oceans, what’s happening to marine ecosystems.Finding out what the issues are and then thinking, what can I do as an individual, what can we do as a society to really tackle the the marine biodiversity crisis that’s unfolding in front of us,” he stated.

The centre represents an opportunity to indicate off the conservation and biodiversity analysis underway at Dalhousie, he added.