The founding director of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre passed away at the age of 92 on Friday, but the aquarium hopes his legacy will live on.
Throughout his 37-year career at the Vancouver Aquarium, Murray Newman was a strong advocate for coastal ocean research and conservation. He retired in 1993.
Born and raised in Chicago, Newman completed a Bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and Master’s degree in zoology from the University of California at Berkeley.
Following his master’s degree, he worked as a museum zoologist at UCLA, where he met his wife Katherine, then a biology student.
The couple moved to Vancouver in 1953, when Murray Newman became the first recipient of the H.R. MacMillan Fellowship in fisheries at UBC.
He earned his PhD under Dr. William Hoar, one of the founding directors of the Vancouver Aquarium, and was offered the job of director in 1955, before the facility had been completed.
His vision for Canada’s public aquarium was to create one of the most prestigious marine facilities in the world, without the assistance of public subsidies.
He is considered one of the pioneers that has led to today’s modern aquariums with a clear focus on the importance of original scientific research.
Newman’s interest in Canada’s Arctic resulted in a decades-long Arctic research program. He would also build a cetacean research program, which has provided important insight into threatened and endangered killer whales that were largely demonized as vicious killers at the time.
To deal with the killer whales, fisheries managers believed they needed to be culled, so a Browning fifty-caliber machine gun was mounted at Seymour Narrows.
But in 1964, the Aquarium commissioned Samuel Burich, a sculptor and commercial fisherman, to make a life-size model of a killer whale. To have an accurate model of the ocean mammal, Bulrich and another fisherman harpooned a whale, but it didn’t die. Newman instructed them to bring the whale back to Vancouver alive.
The whale, that became known as Moby Doll, followed the boat and survived in captivity for three months, catching the attention of people all around the world and marking the beginning of the end of the all-out war on killer whales.
The Vancouver Aquarium purchased its first killer whale, Skana, in 1967 and then acquired Hyak, who was Skana’s companion until her death in 1980.
In 2001, the aquarium’s last killer whale, Bjossa, was transferred to a SeaWorld in San Diego, ending the aquarium’s killer whale program.
After Newman’s retirement, the Murray Newman Awards for Excellence in Conservation and Research were established in his honour.
PHOTO: Global BC reporter Linda Aylesworth with Murray Newman after receiving her Murray Newman Award for Significant Achievement in Science Communication in 2012.
Along with being a pioneer in aquariums, Newman also was a Second World War veteran, serving with both the US Navy and the Marines in the South Pacific.
He collected many accolades during his life, including the Order of Canada in 1979 and the Order of BC in 2006.
In 2013, a number of his medals were stolen in a break-and-enter, but eventually were successfully returned.