Gracie the gray whale: Mission Science Workshop
The festival’s most loyal attendee isn’t a person — it’s a whale.
Every year, Mission Science Workshop, a nonprofit that provides science activities and programs especially to those from underserved communities, brings Gracie, a 30-foot-long juvenile gray whale skeleton, as part of their Whale on Wheels program.
“We found Gracie in 2014 on Pescadero State Beach. It's really sad, but we found her dead on the beach, and she was pretty well preserved. So we cleaned her up. It took us over a year to clean and bury underground, but now she lives in our workshop, and we take her to schools and to events so that people can learn about Gracie,” said Sonia Gandiaga, executive director of Mission Science Workshop.
Seeing Gracie in person is always a shock for festival-goers, many of whom are skeptical of her realness.
“People get very surprised that this is a real skeleton that they can touch, that they can pull, and that they can smell,” Gandiaga said. “They smell the mummified flipper, and they go, ‘Ew, gross. Gross, but cool.’ At the same time, they get so excited when they find her vestigial bone, and they get blown away that whales had legs at one time, or they look at many of the bones, like the scapula or the flipper, and see how similar we are to whales.”
But for Gandiaga, the lesson doesn’t end when the festival does.
“This is not just a one-day event for the year; this is something that keeps going for us,” Gandiaga said. “We have three community science workshops that are open and free for the community all the time. I hope everybody can come and continue exploring and tinkering, and being scientists all year round.”
