A new marine mammals’ skills demonstration at the Dolphinarium will be launched in early February. The presentation based on the history of the exploration of Russia has been created by the Marine Mammal Division’s specialists.
“The Primorsky Aquarium is a research and educational institution, and our main goal is to educate people,” said Dmitii Konstantinov, Lead Specialist of the Media Projects Department, Marine Mammal Division. “Fostering patriotism is very important, because people must know the history of their motherland. In our new marine mammal presentation, we chose to tell the story about the Great Northern Expedition, which mapped Siberia and the Far-Eastern part of Russia and described new plant and animal species. All the marine mammals, which are now under human care at our Dolphinarium, were met by the members of the Expedition.”
“We decided to implement the idea ourselves, without the assistance from external specialists,” pointed out Denis Rusakov, Head of the Department of Media Projects. “We managed to do everything on our own: wrote the script, created animation, edited the video and recorded the soundtrack.”
The presentation will tell visitors about remarkable accomplishments made by the explorers of the Russian Far East areas, about the routes of the Expedition and the animals that we know today owing to this unsurpassed scientific endeavor.
“We are going to show some new stunts, too,” added Anton Brykov, Head of the Marine Mammal Division. “Our animals and their trainers will demonstrate the tricks, which no one in the Russian Far East have performed before.”
Vitus Bering (1681-1741) was the leader of the largest exploration enterprise in the human history. He carried out large-scale geographic research into Siberia and Kamchatka and discovered many geographic objects. The valuable data collected by Vitus Bering made up a foundation for the further scientific investigations.
He was the first to describe the Far-Eastern area of the Russian Empire and mapped 28 human settlements. This great seafarer established that Asia was divided from North America by a strait, found a number of islands between Kamchatka and Alaska and described a large sea along the eastern Russian coast, later named in his honor.
The discoveries made by Vitus Bering have opened a new era in scientific thinking, geographical exploration and the development of the northern sea routes.