The Ozeaneum in Stralsund part 2

Enough whales for now in this series of posts. Once you get up t the top level of the museum there is an exhibit on “The World Ocean – Diversity of life”. Sadly, as all exhibits in the Ozeanuem, it follows the dark&mysterious concept of museum design.Those exhibits with no aquarium tanks are all built following the same concept, with high, large glass cases arranged seemingly randomly across the large rooms, and an orange line on the ground guiding your along the round tour. Aisles are comfortably wide for wheelchairs, by the way. Effectively, this ends up being a maze for your kids to run around and discover things on their own, which is good (educationally) and bad (for parents’ nerves and blood pressure).

There are some interactive exhibit pieces, scale models of seas where you can light up the various parts, e.g. of the Baltic Sea, by pressing buttons. My daughter is a total sucker for such things, so I got to see and operate them all, to the detriment of my photo-taking abilities. Add to that the stroller I was pushing and I guess you can see why there will not be too many photos in this post. Here’s one, showing the auks, part of the exhibit on the Baltic Sea.

another one, of perciform fishes. At the bottom it also shows the steps needed to create the many fish models on exhibit.

As you can see the text is certainly not too long, and indeed I saw many people carefully reading the labels. Most are bilingual, with a longer German version and a shorter English one.

White-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) with a hapless GreylaggGoose (Anser anser). Obviously, I immediately compared the taxidermy to what I am used to seeing at the MfN. Good, but not up to par…. which is no surprise, as the MfN preps regularly win competitions.

From macro-fauna to micro-fauna: there is a way cool thing hanging under the ceiling of this exhibit: a huge 100:1 scale model of plankton!

Details: a Sea gooseberry (ctenophore):

A bivalve larva:

and so on….

Interestingly, these models look even better on the photos than they do in real life, because the through light dominates more than the reflected light. I wish I had had more time to photograph them all in more detail!

There are a few geology-related cabinets, including one on the island Gotland (best! field! trip! evah!), which is choke-full of Silurian invertebrates. Did I mention that my daughter has a penchant for interactive exhibits?

A very beautiful cabinet shows the typical sea-floor of the Western Baltic on rocky ground. I especially love the diving duck!

Another exhibit deals with Exploration and Utilisation of the Seas, and it is pretty cool.But that’s fore the next post. That, and the penguins!