Nanaimo is a research base and biohazard-response site on Vancouver Island during the escalating marine crisis. Its laboratory gives investigators a place to examine threats that cannot be understood from reports alone: there, they study a jelly-like substance found in whale brains and receive crabs suspected of carrying a deadly plague.

Research Base on Vancouver Island

A few weeks before the crisis centre at Chateau Whistler was expanded into an international operation, a base had been established in Nanaimo to observe whale behaviour. The laboratory also became a point of contact for Leon Anawak’s research. After communications had been severed under orders from above, Anawak was eventually permitted to reconnect with Clive Roberts, whose company had been instructed to make him unavailable. The episode shows how scientific work in Nanaimo sits within a wider struggle over access to information and control of the investigation.

Studying the Whale-Brain Substance

In the institute’s projection room, Anawak, John Ford, Sue Oliviera, and Ray Fenwick examine three-dimensional models of whale brains. Oliviera has built the models and marked where the jelly was found; the team can move through the brain and virtually slice it to follow the substance as it winds through the gyri toward the centre. Nanaimo’s facilities thus support an investigation that turns an alarming discovery into a question of how the substance behaves inside its host.

Biohazard Containment and the Crab Shipment

The facility’s role broadens when a consignment of crabs is sent to Nanaimo for examination. The animals are suspected of carrying a plague resembling one associated with poisonous lobsters in Brittany, and the poison is reported to act more quickly than the toxins involved in the European outbreaks. When the crabs arrive, Sigur Johanson comes by helicopter to the institute and is escorted down to the biohazard containment facility, where Anawak, Ford, Bernard Roche, Oliviera, Fenwick, Mick Rubin, and Jack Vanderbilt are gathered. The containment site brings the scientific team and the suspected threat into the same controlled setting, making Nanaimo a place where the crisis is investigated at close range as well as monitored from afar.