Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  We spun up into a horizonless haze, winging south over Guadalcanal. Endless tracts of palm-oil plantation unfurled below us, a man-made monoculture fast replacing the native forests. Every acre and every tree was identical, as though stamped from the same factory mold, with miles of straight roads slashed between them. Now and then we passed over gaggles of rusted-out tanks. “This sort of stuff’s all over the Solomons,” Hamilton said, through the headset. A burst of radio activity caught his attention, and as he listened he suddenly turned the helicopter, veering left: “There’s a bit of chatter on the radio in Honiara,” he told us. “There’ve been some bomb blasts. I just have to get us around that area.”

  “What bomb blasts?” I said.

  Hamilton shrugged. “They find bombs. There are quite a lot of them. They just blow them up.”

  He adjusted the heading and soon we were flying over Ironbottom Sound. Malaita lay before us, snaky and forbidding. Inland rivers carved their way to the ocean. The scenery was dramatic, but I was preoccupied by the fact that my door wasn’t closed properly. At my feet, the water below could be seen through a half-inch crack. And something was rattling—loudly. “Sorry about the unpleasant noise,” Hamilton said. “Nothing we can do about that.”

  Makili sat silently, staring out his window. He didn’t seem to notice the anvil clouds hunkered above Malaita, so I worried enough for both of us. Hamilton was busy, fiddling with instruments. Rain began to pelt the windshield and he glanced up, and turned course again. We skirted the edge of the thunderheads, flying above the mist that streamed off the mountaintops. The ocean changed colors like a mood ring. We rattled on.

  A half hour later, Hamilton gestured toward a club-shaped peninsula ahead. “That’s Fanalei,” he said. “I’m going to fly wide of it, and then I’ll pass above it twice. I’ll go as low as I can.” Makili turned to me in the backseat. “There’s the lagoon where they drive the dolphins in to slaughter,” he said, pointing down. It was a setup reminiscent of Taiji, the coastline forming a ready-made dolphin pen. Once the animals were chased in there, they’d be trapped. I could see dugout canoes heeling in the shallows, and a dark oily slick coating the lagoon’s surface. Near shore the water was brown, rather than blue.

  I was focused on the village, trying to make out detail, when I saw something flash from the trees. Then, nearby, another light flared, and another. Hamilton flinched. “Ohhhhh, this is what I was hoping to avoid,” he said, explaining that the tribesmen were shining mirrors at the sun to signal their displeasure. “What does that mean?” I asked. “Well,” Hamilton said, “it means this is not a good place.”

  On the next pass we dipped lower. I got a closer look at Fanalei’s straw-colored, thatched houses. The construction was primitive. Everything was built at sea level; even moderate waves could wipe away the settlement. Below, a crowd had gathered, waving at the helicopter with agitation. Swaths of debris were visible on the mud flats, though whether they were the remains of dolphins I couldn’t say. Supposedly the villagers ate the meat, but what did they do with the viscera? I suspected they threw the skin and entrails back in the water—there was nowhere to bury anything. I knew from the Al Jazeera footage that Fanalei was knee-deep in dolphin bones: it was impossible to walk anywhere without tripping over a spine someone had tossed, or feeling the crunch of beaks beneath your feet. Makili surveyed the village. “If they had caught any today they’d be cutting them on the beach,” he said.

  “We have to go now,” Hamilton said, with urgency. “I’m going to hear about this.” He turned inland, and away from Fanalei. I looked back at the serpentine coastline, and the barely unsubmerged land. The last thing I saw before the village faded from view was a tribesman in a dugout canoe. The man paddled furiously, racing into the lagoon as if to follow us. Then he dropped the paddle and stood up, shaking his fists at the sky.

  “Ah, these dolphins are sick. They’re really sick.” Makili examined the Kokonut Café photos I’d shot, scrolling through them on my camera. He looked up. “They saw you taking these?”

  “Maybe they did,” I said. “But they were facedown by five o’clock. We got away clean.”

  “Yeah,” Turner agreed. “That kava must be pretty strong.”

  We sat on Turner’s boat in the early evening, drinking yet more SolBrews. It was my last night here, so Turner had invited Makili and me over for dinner. We lounged on the bow, joined by Turner’s Portuguese water dog, Sal.

  I wasn’t the only one leaving. Turner planned to weigh anchor in a few days, and Makili had a flight in the morning to Ghizo, an island in the Solomons’ western province. His fiancée awaited him there, and he had unfinished dolphin business in the area as well. He had referred to this before—and I knew there was something personal in the account—but now I asked him for the whole story. “Ah, nobody cares about it,” Makili said, shaking his head.

  “Yes we do,” Turner said. “Do you need another beer?”

  Makili chuckled. “One thing I want to tell you. Don’t ask a Solomon Islander if they want a beer. Just give one. They’ll drink.”

  Leaning back against a red buoy, Makili began his tale. Not long before I came to Honiara, he had learned that a village on Kolombangara Island, Ghizo’s next-door neighbor, had captured a pod of bottlenoses. “They have a cove,” he explained. “It’s much bigger than Gavutu. The dolphins swim in naturally, that’s what they do. Now the villagers have realized that dolphins are worth a lot of money. This dolphin trade business—they’ve heard about it. So when this pod came in they closed off the entrance. And they held them there for almost a month, captive. When I heard about that, I straightaway went down there.”

  Makili arrived at Kolombangara and found fourteen dolphins, only half alive. Others had already died. The villagers hadn’t fed them: they’d fully expected someone to show up promptly with wads of cash and whisk the dolphins away to the airport. “I spent a week negotiating with the community,” Makili said. He was threatened and menaced; the people were not willing to let the dolphins go without a payout. As Makili described that time, his shoulders began to tremble. Each day, he would go to the lagoon and see the dolphins languishing and feel powerless to help them. “The people denied the very fact that they were suffering,” he said, his voice ragged.

  Turner and I were quiet, listening. Slow reggae music played in the background. Makili crossed his arms, as though hugging himself, and continued. “I walked down to the water,” he said, “and this little calf came straight to me. He lay on my hands. I could see a lot of bruises on him. You could smell it…his body was infected.” He paused to collect himself, but tears had begun to roll down his cheeks. “I spent eighteen minutes in the water with him. I was crying. I was crying in the water and I was shouting.” Makili looked at us; tears quivered in his mustache and beard, spilling onto his shirt. “The little one came with a message. He told me that I have to do something. Do something so that my family doesn’t suffer as I am suffering. He came to me for his last breaths. Then he died in my arms.”

  Makili had walked out of the ocean holding the dead calf, and, with the full force of his emotions, demanded that the villagers release the rest of the dolphins. The next day, they did. He took the calf, whom he had named Little Jacob, back to Ghizo and froze his body. On this next trip, he would bury the dolphin in a gravesite a local landowner had donated. “Now I tend to believe that yes, dolphins do have feelings,” he said. “They knew that I was trying to fight for their lives. They knew it.”

  Now we were all crying. I grabbed Sal and buried my face in her fur. The clouds were tinted peach and the air felt warm and soft, but the story was hard. So was the reality of the Kokonut Café, Gavutu, Fanalei—all the turmoil that had poured out, like poisonous smoke, from under the lid that had been pried open in this place.

  I had a question, rhetorical perhaps, but it had been on my mind for days. “How do you think humans got so cruel?” I asked Makili. He gazed at the ocean, then back at Turner and me. “We forgo
t,” he said, letting the words linger. “We forgot our responsibility. And we forgot that we are as equal as any living thing within the chain. There’s no hierarchy in this. Nah. We are part of the same family: living things. All the rest of it is just totally fucking bullshit.”

  A sly quarter moon had crept into the sky while the daylight dissolved in a blaze of gold. I had planned to bolt for the airport tomorrow morning, but now part of me wanted to change my ticket and follow Makili to Ghizo for Little Jacob’s burial. Or sail to Savo with Turner to find the elusive dolphin cave. It was unlikely I’d ever return to this country, but I realized that my reporting about it wasn’t complete. A piece of the story was missing. Now, after seeing the wreckage he’d left behind, I knew that I needed to talk to Chris Porter.

  Only two miles off the Kona coast, the ocean plunges a mile deep. The drop-off is a long, steep slope to the seafloor, a downhill lava ramp. There are few places in the world where someone can be standing at the marina and, before he’s finished his coffee, find himself suspended over the abyss—Kona is one of them. Which is why Robin Baird, a biologist whose work is focused on deep-water dolphin species, spends so much of his time there.

  While the spinner dolphins venture into the depths at night and then return to the shallows by day, other dolphins hardly ever approach the shore. As with all creatures who dwell in habitats inhospitable to humans, we know very little about them. They are exotic enigmas, as inaccessible to us as snow leopards or harpy eagles. About four times a year, Baird and his team cruise the blue water off the Big Island and Kauai, searching for these uncommon dolphins—false killer whales, pygmy killer whales, melon-headed whales, rough-toothed dolphins, Risso’s dolphins, and striped dolphins—along with their more familiar brethren: pilot whales, bottlenoses, spinners, and spotted dolphins. Every so often he also encounters the dolphins’ close relatives, beaked whales and sperm whales, and he gathers information about them, too. In all, Baird studies eighteen types of toothed whales that live in Hawaii.

  I first met Baird on Maui, where he had stopped by to give a talk at the island’s annual Whale Tales festival, a celebration of the thousands of humpbacks that migrate annually to mate and calve there. (During the winter months, these forty-ton creatures are so visible from any shore that it’s hard to look out and not see them spouting and breaching.) Baird, a jovial fifty-year-old with light blue eyes, ginger hair, and the kind of fair skin that scorches easily, had just finished a two-week research cruise off Kauai. On the day we met for lunch, he was rosy with sunburn.

  I wanted to learn more about the dolphin societies in the open ocean, and by every account, Baird was the man to ask. He is a prolific and well-known scientist who collaborates widely and can reel off details about studies, papers, and cutting-edge science news, reciting from memory as though he were reading from a teleprompter. Baird has an easygoing nature, but there is a jet engine running between his ears. “I’ve always been interested in rare species,” he told me, describing an upbringing on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island that was long on nature and wonder. From childhood, Baird was exposed to orcas, not just the captives who had lived at Victoria’s Sealand of the Pacific, but the magnificent Northwest pods that swam near his home.

  To anyone who has ever seen them in the wild, orcas leave a spectral impression, trailing far more questions than answers in their wake. For his PhD, Baird studied their hunting methods, strategies that require the animals to communicate precisely, cooperate extensively, and work to achieve a shared goal. Any long-lived species that can do these things, Baird said, should be counted among the smartest on earth. Knowing the scope of the orcas’ sophistication, he was doubly fascinated when he saw his first false killer whale, or pseudorca, an even more cryptic ocean citizen. These whales are about two-thirds the size of orcas, with similar thick, conical teeth, a more tapered physique, and dark, muscular bodies. Descriptions of the species often contain adjectives like fast, agile, emotional, and extremely clever.

  This wasn’t just Baird’s first glimpse of a false killer whale: it was the first sighting reported in all of Canada, for anyone, ever. The animal had stranded and didn’t survive, but finding one on its own must have been a relief—pseudorcas form such close bonds that mass strandings are distressingly typical. Once, in 1946, more than eight hundred false killer whales died on a beach in Argentina; groups of more than a hundred have stranded in South Africa, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Florida, among other places. Baird’s interest was stoked. He and his colleagues necropsied the body, extracting every bit of information they could from it.

  The scientists found that the dead whale’s liver was overloaded with mercury and DDT, off-the-charts levels of toxins. In the twenty-eight years since then, Baird has collected biopsies from forty other false killers and discovered a disturbing pattern: they’re all highly contaminated. They are saturated with PCBs, dioxins, flame retardants, heavy metals, pesticides—some of the most noxious carcinogens ever unleashed. Many of these long-lived chemicals, known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs), have been outlawed for decades, but they still linger in the environment. “Over time they’ve been incorporated into food webs and dispersed across ocean basins,” Baird said. “It’s insidious. You can’t see these chemicals and they’re not killing animals outright, they’re just making them more susceptible to infections, and if they get an infection they’ll have greater difficulty dealing with it.” Recently, Baird had helped lead the effort to get false killer whales included on the endangered species list, proving with painstaking science that their numbers are fast declining.

  False killer whales also suffer from a problem that plagues dolphins all over the world, from tiny Hector’s dolphins right up to orcas: as apex predators, their diet consists of the same marine creatures we like to eat, and in recent decades we have hoovered the oceans, wiping out one fish population after the next with our destructive methods. Overfishing, bottom trawling, taking fish before they’re old enough to reproduce, netting and longlining practices that kill indiscriminately—these idiocies have landed both humans and dolphins in a pinch: we’re running out of seafood.

  Though dolphins have been hunting in the planet’s waters for eons longer than we have, they are no match for our onslaught. But they want tuna and salmon and squid too. Where dolphins and commercial fisheries meet, the results can be devastating for dolphins, not just in Japan, where the surreal notion that cetaceans are gluttonously taking all the fish—as opposed to industrial fleets the size of cities scouring the seas with radar, sonar, fish aggregating devices, and spotter aircraft—has cost countless dolphin and whale lives; but even in Hawaii, where most of the false killer whales Baird studies, in three roving pods, have visible injuries from fisheries. Their dorsal fins are lacerated and deformed, sometimes all but razored off, from getting entangled in longlines. Recently, Baird told me, a false killer whale had washed up dead on the Big Island with five fishhooks in its stomach.

  Taken to their extreme, fishermen’s interactions with dolphins can become vengeful. In places where fishing quotas have been lowered due to the collapse of stocks, the animals have even been the targets of hate crimes. In 2012, for instance, dolphins began washing ashore in the Gulf of Mexico, their bodies mutilated. One bottlenose had its tail cut off; another had its jaw severed. Several other dolphins had been shot or slashed open, and one featured a screwdriver stabbed into its head. After seven of these carcasses were found, people began to speculate that a crazed dolphin serial killer was on the loose, with a $30,000 reward offered for information. RACE ON TO FIND GULF COAST DOLPHIN KILLERS, reported CNN. WHAT’S BEHIND SPIKE IN GULF COAST DOLPHIN ATTACKS? asked National Geographic. But the bodies were sprinkled across the region, from Florida to Louisiana, and scientists believed that, far from being the work of a single madman, the cause was more widespread: frustrated fishermen.

  Similar dolphin-loathing sentiments fester in other places. Down in the Amazon, scientists have become alarmed
by the rapid disappearance of the region’s botos, or pink dolphins. For ages, the animals were respected and revered by the local people; now, botos are hunted and used as bait to catch piracatinga, a tasty catfish, and reviled for damaging fishing nets. To find out if the botos were being deliberately targeted, researchers interviewed sixteen fishermen, letting them speak anonymously. Eleven of the fishermen admitted to killing pink dolphins at every opportunity. “Nobody likes the botos,” one man reported. “They are river pests that need to be exterminated. They only cause harm.” “If we let them reproduce,” another explained, “we will not have anything left for the humans.”

  Even in the Hawaiian waters Baird surveyed, which seem at a glance to be sparkling clean and blue, there were vexing signs that neither fishermen nor dolphins were thriving. Tuna populations have plummeted, while the number of longline hooks has quadrupled since 1996. (The boats set miles and miles of these hooks, and then haul in anything that happens to get caught on them, including dolphins, sharks, seals, turtles, and even birds, discarding as much as 40 percent of their catch.) Other fisheries are in worse shape. In the Gulf of Mexico, which supplies much of America’s seafood, conditions have verged on apocalyptic. Even before BP’s Deepwater Horizon well blew in April 2010, gushing an estimated 150 million gallons of crude into one of the most fertile ocean nurseries on earth, the Gulf had been under siege. Pollution, drilling, agricultural runoff, wetland destruction, bottom trawling, overfishing—the area has taken hit after hit. The Gulf is also home to the Atlantic’s biggest dead zone, a nearly 8,000-square-mile area devoid of oxygen. None of this is good for the catch, which has been dwindling rapidly for the past fifteen years. But the BP disaster, in its biblical scope, pushed ecosystems into uncharted territory. Murdered dolphins, while grisly and sad, were not the worst fallout scientists were observing.