Dalhousie announces plans for $12M ocean science centre

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

When it opens in 2025, the marine attraction will give the public a chance to interact with species they rarely see and showcase the university's ocean-related research.

"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," said Derek Tittensor, a biology professor who chairs the centre's science committee.

The 60 planned exhibits will include multiple aquariums, displays of species facing 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 likely 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 family, who donated $8.2 million. Dalhousie will fundraise an additional $4 million.

Beaty contributed to a terrestrial-focused biodiversity centre 15 years ago at the University of British Columbia and wanted to establish 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 told CBC News after the centre was announced on Wednesday.

The project is being developed in collaboration with Discovery Centre International and will become a destination for students from Grade 6 and up, tourists and the public, the university said.

It will be housed inside the Steele Ocean Science Building and will give the public a chance to see species held in the Aquatron, Canada's largest aquatic research facility, which is located next door.

Species on brink of extinction

The Aquatron is home to a variety of marine life, including warm-water visitors to Nova Scotia like seahorses. It also houses critically endangered Atlantic Whitefish, an ancient relative of Atlantic salmon on the brink of extinction.

The Dalhousie facility has more Atlantic whitefish than exist in the wild. The world's remaining population only survives in three lakes behind the Town of Bridgewater.

They are now so precious whenever juvenile Atlantic whitefish are found they are whisked to Dalhousie to preserve the population.

"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," said Aquatron manager John Batt.

Beaty said the Atlantic Whitefish is a visible example of what is happening to a huge number of species that the 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 said.

"It's an example of what we don't see, we don't understand that we're losing."

Dalhousie biologist Derek Tittensor said this kind of public outreach is key to conversation 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 said.

The centre represents a chance to show off the conservation and biodiversity research underway at Dalhousie, he added.