PORT TOWNSEND — Graduate students began work this week to make three-dimensional images available to researchers and museums worldwide of an orca found dead on Dungeness Spit in 2002.
The students from Idaho State University have taken over part of the exhibit space at the center in Fort Worden State Park and begun a project that will scan and digitize a complete orca skeleton, part of the process of creating a virtual museum experience.
“When this is done, we will be able to take the images on a DVD and show them on any television,” said Eric Harrington, the center’s board chairman.
“This is the first time that something like this has been done anywhere in the world.”
Next week, assembly will begin of the more than 200 bones of the skeleton of CA-189, or Hope, that have been carefully prepared and documented.
Lee Post, an “articulation expert” from Alaska, will put together the approximately 22-foot-long skeleton one bone at a time.
“This will be a pretty unique resource to be sitting in this town, in this area,” Harrington said.
The digitization and assembly processes will be viewable by the public for free during two weekends, Feb. 4-6 and Feb. 11-13, from noon to 4 p.m. at the center, 100 Lighthouse Drive.
“People will be able to see whatever we have done at that time,” Palmer said.
During the scanning and digitizing, the scanner coordinates lasers and cameras to consolidate a three-dimensional model, said Nicholas Clement, one of the graduate students working on the project.
“Eventually, we pull the images together so they look exactly the same in digital space as they do in real life,” he said.
Added his colleague Robert Schlader: “The images can be measured and weighed in this space in the same way that you could do with the object itself.”
The work is part of the Orca Project, which will be an exhibit telling the story of the dead orca and the living male orca found near her.
The story of Hope began Jan. 2, 2002, when a dead female orca washed up on the inside of Dungeness Spit in Sequim, an unusual occurrence, said Libby Palmer, director of the center’s orca program.
Another orca, assumed to be her son, was nearby in shallow water, alive and staying close to the dead female.
Eventually, the young male orca was towed into deeper water.
The dead orca was buried in manure and allowed to decompose until nothing was left but the bones.
It originally was given no name but rather a catalogue number, CA-189. But the center later held a contest to name the dead orca and came up with Hope.
“Hope is symbolic of what we hope will be her contribution to sustaining the orca population,” Palmer said.
When her blubber was tested for toxins, the reading for PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) was the highest ever recorded for an orca — approximately 1,000 parts per million parts blubber, Jacobson said.
Scientists hope to study the bones and perhaps answer questions about how pollutants affect orcas and whales and why CA-189 died.
After being shipped around to several institutions, the bones were sent to the marine science center.
The bones arrived at the marine science center in summer 2009. There, volunteers documented each bone, creating the first bone atlas for an orca.
Now, all the bones are arranged in the exhibit hall, where they are being individually scanned using a $80,000 laser camera that creates three-dimensional images.
The original skeleton, once assembled, will eventually serve as the centerpiece for the center’s new exhibit hall, for which funds are now being raised.
The center doesn’t own the skeleton but expects that it will be on display for a while — especially since the assembly will be accomplished onsite
“We demonstrated that we were going to have education projects that would have the greatest impact on the community,” Harrington said.
“It helped that we had a local connection and that we were so close to where she beached herself, the whole story taking place within 30 miles of here.”
Harrington said the complete skeleton will provide a “road map” of the orca’s bones and will help identify random bones that are found on the beach.
Schlader said the orca digitization is part of a larger project, a virtual mapping of the Arctic region, which he hopes will redefine museums.
“There are some interesting bits of technology that are sitting right on the cusp of becoming awesome,” he said, referring to projectors and manipulation software needed to make an image come alive.
“By the time we finish this project, this technology will be within the hands of smaller museums, as the hardware and the software that helps to create it will become more affordable,” he added.
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.