Loving Thy Nonsuch – Care of a Beloved Ship

By Dr. Randall Mooi, Curator of Zoology, Manitoba Museum

October is when bats – or their silhouettes, at least – are hard to miss! You’ll likely come across multiple houses this month proudly displaying these winged wonders alongside jack-o-lanterns and witches. However, these fascinating flying mammals won’t be joining in on the fun of trick-or-treating. By the end of September, three of Manitoba’s bat species will have migrated south to find food, whereas the other three will be hibernating locally.

Bats: Small but Mighty

Manitoba’s largest species is the hoary bat with a 40 cm wingspan, though it weighs only about 30 g – less than an AA battery! The smallest species weighs as little as 5 g – just a little more than a quarter. They are all nocturnal and, although they do feed on mosquitoes, usually go for larger prey such as moths and beetles. Bats can be important in controlling agricultural pests, saving billions of dollars in crop damage.

Scary times to be a bat

Because Manitoba’s bats are active at night, most of us are unaware that their numbers have plummeted across North America. Several are endangered, including our own little brown bat and northern long-eared bat. These two hibernating species are susceptible to white-nose syndrome, a fungal infection (likely introduced from Europe) that interrupts hibernation patterns and has decimated bat populations in the east. This fungus now occurs in Manitoba and similar dire outcomes are expected.

Thousands of migrating bats are killed by wind turbines every year. Although renewable energy is an imperative, bats are attracted to wind turbines with murderous results. Because bats migrate on relatively calm nights for short periods in spring and fall, it should be possible to mitigate the effect of wind turbines on bat populations while minimizing economic impacts.

By Amelia Fay, Curator of Anthropology & HBC Museum Collection

With Orange Shirt Day (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) on the horizon, folks might be thinking about their role in Truth and Reconciliation. Many Indigenous leaders have argued the need to understand the truth before reconciliation, and this is where museums can step in and play an important role.

Although museums carry a lot of colonial baggage, my colleagues and I at the Manitoba Museum (past and present) have been  working hard to make our museum a safe space to learn about history. Not only do we have some great exhibits and programs to help visitors engage with difficult histories, we also have a lot of resources available on both our website and YouTube channel that you can view from home.

Not sure where to begin? Below are a few topics that I think are a great starting place, no matter where you are in your reconciliation learning journey.

• The colonial process in Canada started long before Confederation, so I encourage visitors to reconsider the history of the fur trade, including the early beginnings of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Watch the following video to learn more about the Hudson’s Bay Company Royal Charter.

• What does the phrase ‘We Are All Treaty People’ mean? Visit our friends at the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba’s Agowiidiwinan Centre at the Forks and then come check out the numerous Treaty exhibits throughout the Museum Galleries.
• Take time to learn more about Residential Schools in Manitoba, visit the schoolhouse exhibit in the Prairies Gallery and  use the digital kiosks embedded in the desks. You can also see the same information on our website when you visit ManitobaMuseum.ca/ResidentialSchools.

For many non-Indigenous readers, learning more about these topics might bring up a lot of feelings and make you uncomfortable, and that’s okay. The important thing is to not dismiss information that challenges what you knew about Canadian history, but instead sit with the discomfort and think about why you might feel this way. Part of our shared journey towards reconciliation involves hard work like this, but it’s important work that we all must undertake.

Join us for a time of learning, reflection, and response at Orange Shirt Days @ the Manitoba Museum. Three days of free admission to all areas September 30 to October 2. No tickets required.

By Scott Young, Planetarium Astronomer

Have you ever seen the stars? Like, really SEEN them, from a dark place, far away from the lights of the city. If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you are missing one of the great beauties of the natural world.

The night sky is magical. Take even the most jaded person and put them under the stars, and it gives them a sense of awe and wonder. We can’t help it – we are hard-wired to be amazed by the stars.

I’m sure there is some explanation for why that is. Probably, because our ancient ancestors who *didn’t* like the stars also didn’t figure out the cycles of the heavens and the progression of the seasons, and so didn’t make it through a winter that they couldn’t predict. The sky has given us clock, calendar, and a certainty about our understanding of the universe around us, and civilization was built upon that knowledge. The sky was one of humanity’s greatest discoveries, right up there with fire, the wheel, and chocolate.

Today, with satellite weather and pocket-sized supercomputers, we don’t need the sky for such basic purposes. (It still works, by the way, in case the zombie apocalypse or robot uprising sets us back to the dark ages.) We have telescopes in space and are flying drones on other planets. Yet more than ever, people are looking to the sky with interest. Even with all the things we know about the universe, there’s still a sense of mystery and wonder that makes us want to experience it ourselves.

And you can. You don’t need a telescope to start exploring the sky tonight. All you need is a clear sky, and a place even a little sheltered from nearby lights. Even from downtown Winnipeg you can see the Moon, the brighter planets, and many of the familiar star patterns like the Big Dipper or Summer Triangle. An ordinary pair of binoculars can give you a closer view and expand the number of objects you can track down. Books, apps, and online videos can teach you the sky one piece at a time, and each discovery you make will be yours. It doesn’t matter that Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter four centuries ago – when you discover them for the first time in a pair of binoculars, you will feel the same thrill of excitement he did, and your personal universe will have gotten a little bit larger.

Explore Manitoba’s Skies!

Visit the Planetarium this summer to venture to far-off galaxies, witness spectacular solar systems, and get to know the stars in our very own skies.

Buy your tickets today to reserve your seat under the stars!

By Dr. Graham Young
Past Curator of Paleontology & Geology

Walking into the Manitoba Museum’s Earth History Gallery, you see an enticing undersea scene in the middle distance. Passing through an opening, you find yourself in a small room that feels like an underwater observatory.

Here in the Ancient Seas exhibit, a giant curved screen wraps around two walls, and on that screen you see projected a coral-lined boulder shore, with strange and wonderful sea creatures: large cephalopods similar to a “squid in a shell” swim in the water, flower-like crinoids wave in the dappled sunlight, and giant trilobites related to crabs and spiders plough through seafloor sediment. This submarine world represents our best understanding of what the Churchill area looked like about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period, long before polar bears or mosquitoes appeared on this planet. 

In this beautiful exhibit, one of the things visitors find most remarkable is the statement that Churchill was tropical, that “Manitoba straddled the equator and had a warm climate.” How can Manitoba have moved so much? The simple answer is that Manitoba has moved as part of a much bigger land mass. In the Ordovician Period, the heart of North America was already a distinct continent, called Laurentia by geologists.

Just like continents do today, the ancient continents were moving by the process of plate tectonics. Land masses move toward or away from one another at about the same rate your toenails grow, an average of about 1.5 cm per year. If you move a continent at that speed over 450 million years, it can travel a very long way! Ordovician Laurentia was moving toward ancient parts of Europe and Africa, and more than 100 million years later this resulted in the formation of Pangaea (the “world supercontinent”) about 335 million years ago. After Pangaea pulled apart 200 million years ago, North America moved northwestward, eventually arriving where we are now! 

Exhibits like Ancient Seas tell us about this place in very different past times. Many of the people in Manitoba came here from distant places, and now we also know that the land itself has travelled, and changed almost beyond recognition. At the Museum you can see some of that distant past, and appreciate our former worlds.