by Susan Casey
In the years since the epic spill occurred—and the toxic, volatile (and little studied) dispersant, Corexit, was sprayed with abandon in its aftermath—the tab for our negligence has come due, and it is being picked up by marine life. Despite public relations’ assurances that everything is just fine, that the oil has miraculously disappeared, eaten by microbes perhaps, but in any case long gone, evidence has mounted that dolphins, along with fish, shellfish, corals, and even plankton, have been severely contaminated. Along the Gulf Coast, shrimp and fish without eyes, or even eye sockets, have been hauled in, gaping lesions are commonplace, crabs’ shells are not developing properly, corals are smothered in brown gunk, and dead dolphins have rolled up in appalling numbers from Texas to Virginia.
One startling effect was a flood of babies and fetuses, more than eighty stillborn bottlenose calves coming ashore in the Gulf during the first four months of 2011. There was an influx of dead adult dolphins too, beginning even earlier, three times the number found in an average year. A cold snap before the spill didn’t help the dolphins’ defenses, but it defies logic to think that swimming in a stew of contaminants wasn’t a major cause of the spike. For the past five years (and counting) the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) has been monitoring an “Unusual Mortality Event” among the Gulf’s dolphins. Though it is only one of sixty such die-offs in the United States since 1991, it is a doozy. Between May 2010 and May 2015, 1,199 dolphins have washed up dead. Those are only the ones that we’ve found. Given that most dead dolphins don’t ever make it to shore, their bodies sinking in the deep or being eaten by predators, scientists estimate that the real number of dolphin casualties could be fifty times higher. And the bodies keep coming.
In Barataria Bay, Louisiana, a formerly rich estuary inhabited by bottlenose pods, a 2013 study of thirty-two dolphins found that most of the animals were grievously ill or dying. They had lung and liver disease and depleted hormones; they were underweight and anemic. Many of the dolphins had lost their teeth. “I’ve never seen such a high prevalence of very sick animals,” said NOAA’s Lori Schwacke, the lead scientist. “What we are seeing is consistent with oil exposure.”
In the face of these facts it’s hard not to get infuriated, to become overwhelmed. But one of the intriguing things about Baird is his measured outlook. While he feels strongly about protecting the animals he studies, he is never strident. Baird’s philosophy when dealing with less dolphin-friendly interests is that it’s better to collaborate with them, seeking to minimize harm to marine life (which can conceivably be done), rather than eliminate threats (which is probably impossible). “I tend to be fairly pragmatic and recognize that the world is a complicated place,” he told me.
Recently, Baird had been part of a “take reduction” team put in place by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to investigate ways in which fewer false killer whales and other dolphins might get snared in Hawaii’s commercial fisheries. Included on the team were a number of fishermen. When I asked if a spirit of cooperation had prevailed, Baird hesitated. “Uh…yessss,” he said, with a dry smile. “Not necessarily as much as you’d hope.” But it was important to recognize the interests of a multibillion-dollar business, he stressed, if you wanted to get anything done. In the end, an agreement was reached in which the longliners will stay farther away from the main islands, and adopt circular hooks that are easier for the dolphins to dodge. “I eat fish,” Baird said, “and I think fishing should continue. I just think it should be done sustainably and in a way that doesn’t impact protected species.” Perusing the menu, he recommended the mahi-mahi: “It’s fast growing and has high reproductive potential. It only lives a couple of years so it has done fairly well in response to the overfishing of a lot of other things, like tuna and swordfish.” A short life span also means the mahi-mahi will spend less time marinating in ocean pollutants.
Baird’s collegial spirit also extends to the captivity industry, though like other scientists he is aghast at Japan’s dolphin hunts. “I’m not one of these people who think you should release all the captive dolphins, but I definitely think there should be no captures from the wild,” he said, describing how, as a kid, aquarium and zoo visits had sparked his fascination with animals. “I guess if I were in charge, I would force them all to have a really strong educational and conservation message. For some species, like bottlenose dolphins, I’d be okay with it as long as they were looked after properly. But I don’t think they are.”
When trying to find a reasonable balance in dolphin-human affairs, Baird’s most challenging constituent is also one of his main sources of funding: the U.S. Navy. On one hand, the Navy, America’s steward of the seas, has bankrolled more ocean research than any other entity. On the other hand, it does so for its own ends, or because it is forced to by the courts. Many of Baird’s investigations in Hawaii, for instance, are fact-finding missions to assess the toll of the Navy’s increasing use of mid- and low-frequency sonar around creatures whose lives depend on their acoustic senses. Sonar is the Navy’s main tool, used to detect the presence of enemy submarines or other underwater threats, but it is also one of the loudest noises in the sea. The brawniest sonar systems can flood the water with 236 decibels of sound, about the same head-splitting intensity as a rocket launch.
The quest for more information about why—in the vicinity of undersea war games—dolphins and whales have often stranded en masse with blood streaming out of their ears and eyes, was not rooted in the Navy’s concern for the animals. It was spurred by lawsuits from environmental groups, not to mention public fury. Baird’s research—and studies by other scientists—has pinpointed areas where the most vulnerable cetaceans live, so the warships could ideally steer clear of them. Perhaps the Navy could build its $127 million Undersea Warfare Training Range somewhere other than the only known calving grounds of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, or refrain from missile tests within a mile of American shores. Maybe we could set aside small refuges? There were, after all, 139 million square miles of ocean out there. For peacetime training exercises anyway, it didn’t seem like too much to ask.
Amazingly, it was. Though military sonar is proven to wreak havoc on cetaceans—driving them away from feeding areas, causing them to beach in panic, interfering with their communications and mating and resting, bubbling up hemorrhages and embolisms in their organs—the Navy has battled all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid even the most modest restrictions. Its stance, unwavering and defiant, is that it will strafe the oceans wherever and whenever it wants—and anyone who disagrees with it is jeopardizing national and even global security.
Far from taking steps to reduce its impact, in 2012 the Navy submitted a five-year proposal to dramatically ratchet up its war exercises. Plans included 500,000 hours of sonar operations and the detonation of 260,000 explosives in Hawaii and Southern California alone. By the Navy’s own estimates, this would result in 155 dolphin and whale deaths in these waters, along with 2,000 serious permanent injuries, and some 9.6 million instances of hearing loss and disruptions of vital behaviors—a 1,100 percent increase it referred to as “negligible.”
For years before the body count of brain-pulped cetaceans became too high to sweep under the rug, the Navy denied its sonar had even the slightest effect on dolphins and whales. As for underwater bomb detonations, the noise was as benign to them, one Navy scientist claimed, as someone dropping a book onto a table would be to us. Given its record of understatement, the fact that the Navy’s own harm predictions were so high meant the real damage to marine life was likely to be far greater.
After the NMFS rubber-stamped the Navy’s proposal, a coalition of environmental groups sued it, and won. In a March 2015 ruling noted for its unusually strong language, the Navy and the NMFS were found to have basically ignored the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act, and advised not to merely tweak existing plans, but to head right back to the drawing bo
ard. For anyone who cares if there are any creatures left swimming in the sea, it was a victory. But the matter was far from settled. In fact, the fighting had just begun.
These days, a major part of Baird’s work involved placing satellite tags on the dolphins and whales who frequent the depths, where they are more at risk from sonar exposure. The tags track movements with precision. Baird can log onto his computer to see how the tagged animals react to Navy activities, which are widespread in Hawaii. Twice a year, for instance, off the northwest corner of Kauai, the Navy conducts its submarine commanders course, with days of constant sonar. And every other year, Hawaii hosts RIMPAC, the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, the world’s largest gathering of international navies. During RIMPAC, the islands thrum with combat drills, mock battles, bomb blasts.
Our footprints were stamping through the ocean so fast that it was almost a race against time to gather data, particularly for the little-known species Baird studied. If there was any chance to save the fragile populations of false killer whales or melon-headed whales or beaked whales or numerous others, the time for intervention was at hand. Hard scientific information, while not necessarily adding up to power against Goliaths like the Navy, fisheries, and oil companies, was at least…something. It was a stone for David’s tiny slingshot. It was a snippet of hope against a future in which only warfare and oil extraction and fish farming flourished in the seas.
Baird had already established the existence of resident melon-head whale, false killer whale, pygmy killer whale, and pilot whale populations in Hawaii; he had published papers about their ranges and their numbers, and had submitted them to the NMFS with his recommendations that their turf be spared from aggressive sonar use. He had tagged 218 dolphins and whales—and he had watched them adapt (or not) to the cacophony around them. “My feeling is that some species are really susceptible to impacts and others are probably pretty tolerant,” he said, describing pods of bottlenose and rough-toothed dolphins that frequent the Navy’s testing range. “Some individuals have probably been exposed to sonar their entire lives.”
But the dolphins don’t give up their secrets easily. Baird’s work takes time and resources and, above all, patience. “One of my long-term interests is, how do you study animals that spend most of their time underwater?” he said, with an exaggerated shrug. The search for the nomads, the deep divers, the dolphins who might surface for a heartbeat and then vanish into the void, is not a task for landlubbers or the easily discouraged. On an average day, Baird starts at sunrise, ends in the late afternoon, and covers a hundred miles in a small boat.
The best way for me to understand his research, Baird said, would be to accompany his team on a field project. In three months he would be returning to Hawaii, coincidentally during RIMPAC 2014. This year the war games were slated to be bigger than ever: twenty-two nations would be participating, along with forty-nine warships, six submarines, more than two hundred aircraft, and 25,000 personnel. From late June through early August there would be torpedo firings, ship sinkings, cat-and-mouse submarine hunts—a sonar jamboree.
“If I didn’t warn you, we spend a lot of time just cruising around.”
Baird, clad head-to-toe in sun-protective clothing, sat on the flying bridge of his twenty-seven-foot Boston whaler, piloting us toward the southern tip of the Big Island. We were a few miles offshore; the calm conditions were perfect for sighting the little disturbances that might be a dolphin’s dorsal fin; even the blip of a fish breaking the surface was visible from afar. From the start the day had been hot, the sky layered with wispy clouds that only seemed to intensify the sun’s glare. There were six of us on board, each with specific tasks, drilled in as though we were operating our own miniature RIMPAC. While on land Baird had seemed mellow, on the water he morphed into a cheerful taskmaster: every minute we were out here, not a single degree of ocean went unobserved. Each person’s eyes swept a 180-degree stretch, back and forth and back and forth like windshield wipers. On the horizon I could see the dark outlines of naval destroyers and cruisers, hulking vessels that looked like something from a dystopian Xbox game.
Daniel Webster, Baird’s right-hand colleague, stood at the bow. Webster was athletic and nimble, a midsize forty-year-old with brown hair tucked under a baseball cap. He was quiet but quick to smile, and he exuded the competence I’d come to associate with scientists who spend a lot of time on boats. There is a high degree of difficulty to performing intricate tasks on a tiny, rocking, heaving platform, and keeping sensitive electronic equipment functioning in corrosive heat and saltwater. When a Cuvier’s beaked whale poked its head above water for maybe a second and a half, Webster was the one charged with tagging it, while Baird positioned the boat. This is about as simple as hitting an archery bull’s-eye while balancing on a BOSU ball, on a conveyor belt.
Like Baird, Webster was an experienced birder. It was one of the most valuable skills a deepwater dolphin researcher could have, the line item on any biologist’s résumé that was most likely to earn him a spot on Baird’s team. Catching a distant glimpse of a hurtling object the size of a baseball and being able to discern minute details about the stripes on its wingtips or the notch on its beak was exactly the kind of laser vision required to spot, for instance, a far-off ripple that was actually a false killer whale coming up for a breath.
Facing Webster, scouting the expanse of ocean behind him, was biologist Brenda Rone. Tall and lean, with the muscles of someone whose work was physically demanding, Rone specialized in difficult whale assignments. She worked often in the cold, unruly waters off Alaska, the Arctic, and Canada’s eastern coast, searching for blue whales and right whales, bowheads and humpbacks, maneuvering to tag their rolling bodies from the bouncy-castle flimsiness of dinghies. Today, she leaned against the whaler’s windshield, eyes hidden behind polarized sunglasses, hair scraped back in a ponytail, and a gaiter pulled over her face to shield her from the remorseless sun. Rounding out the crew was Jim Ward, a high-spirited photographer in his twenties, and Kelly Beach, a sweet-natured, whip-smart intern from Baird’s group, the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington.
Photography was a critical part of the process. Stacked behind Rone were hard-sided Pelican cases, containing Canon 7D cameras with zoom lenses. When they occurred, the encounters with rare dolphins were fast and furious, and the most important thing, aside from tagging, was to document the animals who had showed themselves. For all three false killer whale pods he had met in these waters, Baird knew their members as individuals. Later, back on land, he would pore over the pictures and ply information from them: who was still around, who was missing, who had a new calf or a fresh dorsal fin injury, who was looking especially skinny. When there were so few dolphins left in a species, every observation mattered.
To raise the odds of finding his reclusive study subjects, Baird had created fliers he left with sportfishing boats, tour operators, scuba clubs—anyone who might happen upon a pod of false killer whales on the water. On the back, his contact information was highlighted, including his cell phone number. He also passed out laminated field guides with photos of the pseudorca’s dorsal fins, each bearing its signature deformation. The guides were beautifully designed and crammed with facts about the species. Outreach is key, Baird explained, when you hope to raise concern for creatures most people have never heard of, and will probably never see. To draw children’s attention, Baird had even made press-on pseudorca tattoos.
Because it was my first day, I had been allotted the seat next to Baird on the bridge. Up there it was partially shaded, a major bonus. My main task, not very demanding, was to hit a clicker whenever anyone spotted a wedge-tailed shearwater or a Bulwer’s petrel, two sea-bird species. When a less likely bird whizzed overhead, Baird yelled out, “Photo!” calling the species on the fly: “Black-winged petrel!” Webster hung his body over the rail, his camera whirring on motor drive. While cruising, Baird noted everything, every sighting and perturbation and augury. In the past, the team had
stopped to pick up bobbing trash bags and discarded fishing nets and other plastic debris, but after an average day the boat had become so laden with crap that the marina now forbid them from using its dumpsters.
The most common floating objects were balloons. Released during festivities, helium wafting them over the sea, these shiny Mylar orbs were killers. Turtles, dolphins, and other marine animals ate them, mistaking them for fish or squid, with fatal results. I had noticed a sticker on Webster’s tagging case that read: BALLOONS BLOW, DON’T LET THEM GO! “Most of the balloons we pick up have some sort of party writing on them,” Baird noted. When people fling their birthday wishes or their graduation congratulations or their wedding celebrations to the sky, they have no idea how lethal their actions are.
We motored slowly south, to avoid the trade winds. The light turned silvery yellow, portentous clouds massing above the volcano peaks. Webster came up and sat with us in the shade, because there wasn’t much happening on the water. We stopped to net a dead squid, its deep maroon body bitten in half, and we saw frigate birds gliding overhead, a red-tailed tropic bird, and some ahis hopping about, but there was a distinct lack of dolphins. Several hours in, I was getting it: this was needle-in-a-haystack work. “We see pseudorcas about once every three weeks,” Webster said. Baird nodded: “That’s why, historically, there hasn’t been a lot of research on the species. But we try to be productive the rest of the time. We’ll work with whatever we find out here.”
I had wondered what it was about false killer whales that so captivated Baird, and as we were driving, I asked him. Baird brightened; there were few things he liked to talk about more. Prior to his arrival in Hawaii, he and his wife, Annie, had driven from Olympia up to the Vancouver Aquarium, where a pseudorca calf was being rehabilitated after being rescued from the beach. In a fortunate reversal of Baird’s first false killer whale stranding, the calf, who’d been named Chester, had survived, though he was only about six weeks old, still toothless and dependent on his mother’s milk. Initially, no one thought Chester would make it, but so far he had, and now the aquarium staff and the public—anyone who’d met him—were equally smitten. The thing about false killer whales that surprises people, Baird told me, is that they are fascinated by us, “so much more than any other animal I’ve ever interacted with.” He grinned affectionately. “They recognize humans as being something similar to them.”