Bernie had begged the man for some clue, mentioning Paul Watson’s reward, which had now swelled to $56,000. “He said, ‘No, no, I don’t need the money. It’s not that I don’t need it, it’s just that they did something very bad.’” If he talked, he was sure that he and his family would be killed.
On July 31 the OIJ conducted a predawn raid, called Operation Baula, at several houses around Limón. Dozens of armed agents arrested six men, including Felipe Arauz, the 38-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant suspected of being the ringleader of the violent hueveros. A seventh man was caught 10 days later. The suspects were Darwin and Donald Salmón Meléndez, William Delgado Loaiza, Héctor Cash Lopez, Enrique Centeno Rivas, and Bryan Quesada Cubillo. While Lizano knew of the alleged killers, she was relieved that she hadn’t worked with them. “Thank God none were my poachers,” she said.
Detectives from the OIJ had been talking to informants and quietly tracking Mora’s stolen cell phone. According to court documents, one of the suspects, Quesada, 20, had continued to use it, sending incriminating texts. One read: “We dragged him on the beach behind Felipe’s car and you know it.”
To Lizano the motive was clearly revenge, but the authorities cast the crime as “a simple robbery and assault.” They also laid blame on Mora and Lizano’s failed attempt to hire poachers for conservation. An OIJ spokesman claimed that the program had bred resentment among hueveros. The accusation infuriated Lizano. “They’re just looking for a scapegoat,” she said.
Lizano thought that the authorities were deflecting blame. It turned out that on the night of the murder, a police patrol had encountered several of the suspects—they were the same men the cops had warned Mora about. A few hours later the gang lay in wait. Whether or not they intended to kill Mora will be argued at the trial later this spring.
Even so, the arrests haven’t brought much closure to those closest to Mora. Almudena, back in Madrid, was deeply depressed when I reached her. “Jairo is dead,” she said. “For me there is no justice.” The only positive outcome, as she saw it, would be for a preserved beach. “In ten years there have to be turtles at Moín,” she said. “If not, this has happened for nothing.”
Lizano, meanwhile, redoubled her efforts to protect Moín. Any legislative change to preserve the beach is far off, and the turtles now face an additional threat—a massive container-port development project that a Dutch conglomerate hopes to build nearby. Still, Lizano told me, “I really believe it has to continue. I can’t stop and let the poachers win. For me it’s not an option.”
In July, Lizano brought Fedé back to Moín. She woke him up one morning before sunrise, and together with a group of volunteers they walked to the beach. The night before, at the sanctuary, the first turtle hatchlings had broken up through the sand in their Styrofoam-cooler nests. Lizano showed Fedé how to lift the tiny flapping things out and set them gently on the sand. The people stood back and watched as the turtles inched down the beach, making their way toward the breaking waves and an uncertain future.
SARAH SCHWEITZER
Chasing Bayla
FROM The Boston Globe
“THIRTY METERS,” MICHAEL MOORE called out.
Moore braced himself against the steel of the Zodiac’s platform tower as the boat closed in on the whale in the heaving Florida waters. Through the rangefinder he could see the tangled mass of ropes cinched tightly around her. It was impossible to tell where the ropes began and where they ended.
This much he knew. The ropes were carving into her. Bayla was in pain.
He was tempted to look away. It was almost too much to see.
Her V-shaped spray erupted, then disappeared into a mist as she slipped beneath the surface. A spot plane circling overhead radioed. They could still see her silhouette. She hadn’t gone deep.
“Get in close if you can,” Moore said to the boat’s driver.
Bayla would come up for air again soon.
Then he would have his chance.
For nearly three decades Moore had dedicated himself to North Atlantic right whales like Bayla. He knew every inch of their anatomy, every detail of the strange and glorious physiology that made them so astoundingly powerful and so utterly defenseless against the ropes.
They were majestic and doomed, his love and his burden. He had believed he could save them. But in those 30 years he’d watched too many succumb. Saving just two female whales a year could stabilize a population that humans had driven down to just 450 from the teeming thousands that once greeted settlers to the New World.
And so he had raced down the interstate through a driving New England snowstorm after the e-mail had come.
The details were grim. Bayla had been spotted off the coast of Florida three weeks earlier, on Christmas Day, 2010. Rope anchored in her mouth. It coiled around her flippers in a skein of tangled loops. With every move it pulled tighter.
The rope was likely polypropylene, a synthetic weave favored by Northeast fishermen and lobstermen for its brute strength against the abrading forces of a rocky-bottomed seabed. Blubber was no match for it. Bayla’s body was cut open in places, as though by cheese wire.
Her back sloped alarmingly, a sign of emaciation from hauling rope more than 10 times her length, possibly for months. It was like she had been swimming with an open parachute.
Biologists from Florida and Georgia had tried to cut the ropes. But Bayla threw them off with heaves of her massive tail and stunningly quick hairpin turns. They tried again a day later. Still they couldn’t get near enough. She was a bucking bronco.
And so they summoned Moore.
Moore had engineered something that could be a breakthrough for rescuers, a way to sedate whales at sea. The man standing to his left on the Zodiac platform held the instrument Moore had conceived for the task: a pressurized rifle tipped with a dart and syringe filled with 60 cc’s of a sedative so powerful that a few drops on human skin could kill.
Bayla was probably seven tons, but you can’t weigh a free-swimming whale. If the estimate was wrong, an overdose could plunge Bayla into a catastrophic slumber and she would drown.
Moore scanned the horizon. Fishing charters and Disney Cruise liners jockeyed for space at the shore. Ahead, the vast reach of the Atlantic met at every point with the prickling Florida sun.
He knew that the work of a lifetime shouldn’t come down to a single moment. He was the father of four grown boys. He loved his wife. His home was an island in Marion Harbor. He had published scores of peer-reviewed papers and commanded millions in grant money.
Yet the vow he had made to himself as a young man, the thing he had dedicated his career and heart to, remained unfulfilled. For Moore, nearing retirement and running out of ideas, there might be no more chances.
Blow spouted off the port bow.
“Twenty-one meters,” he called to the man with the dart rifle.
Bayla’s hobbled body arced through the swells.
“Shoot.”
For more than a thousand years, humans hunted the North Atlantic right whale. Big, slow, and without guile, the whales often ventured up to boats, rolled over, and eyed their pursuers with peering curiosity, making for easy marks. Endowed with abundant blubber, right whales also floated after being killed. It was a grimly convenient attribute that, legend has it, afforded them their name. They were the right whale to kill.
Basques hunted them in the Dark Ages. The rest of the European continent followed. Pilgrims on the Mayflower spied right whales as they came into Cape Cod Bay, a feeding ground for the vast animals. “Every day we saw whales playing hard by us,” one passenger wrote. The ship’s master and mate lamented they didn’t have the tools to kill the whales. They soon would. An industry quickly took root in maritime New England. On a single day in January of 1700, colonists killed 29 right whales off the Cape.
Oil from right whale blubber helped propel the Colonial economy, lighting homes and stores and creating wealth and prosperity. By the time whale oil demand faded and right whales wer
e protected from hunting, in 1935, their numbers had been reduced from the thousands to some 100 in the North Atlantic.
Today right whales remain among the rarest animals on earth. Their pursuers are whale-watching boats and a legion of scientists who track them in the hope of figuring out why their numbers hover stubbornly in the low hundreds, a population so fragile that it could be wiped out with one algal bloom.
Researchers say the peril can be traced once again to humans—this time because right whales get in our way, or we in theirs. Dubbed the “urban whale,” North Atlantic rights live along the eastern seaboard, one of the most developed coastal zones in the world. Migrating from southern calving grounds to northern feeding climes is an industrial obstacle course for the whales, studded with pollution, noise, ships, and, most devastatingly, fishing gear—often buoy-tethered ropes leading to lobster pots and crab traps.
Among whales, rights are particularly prone to getting caught in the gear, with 83 percent of those tracked by scientists bearing scars from entanglement. Their special susceptibility, researchers say, owes to feeding with open mouths—filtering tiny prey through their long plates of baleen but also taking in the ropes so common in their domain. Once snagged, the whales frantically spin their bodies trying to get free, but their gyrations instead loop the ropes around flippers and flukes. Unlike weaker whale species, which tend to drown when entangled, right whales, which run to 50 feet and 60 tons or more, often have the strength to swim with the lacerating ropes for months, sometimes years.
It’s not known how many right whales die from entanglement. Scientists have recorded an average of four such confirmed and presumed deaths per year since 2008, but they believe many more perish this way unrecorded. In a species plagued by abnormally low reproductive rates, in some years with a single calf born in the known population, scientists worry that deaths from ropes could be right whales’ ultimate undoing—Moore chief among them.
In the summer of 1979, a grungy 28-foot sailboat with a scruffy crew docked in Newfoundland’s treeless peninsula of Bay de Verde, an outcropping of houses, a fish processing plant, and a bar called the Holding Ground.
Word went around that the boat’s inhabitants were long-hairs, American college students fired up by the “Save the Whales” movement who had hitchhiked to Newfoundland to study humpback whales. The students played sea shanties on concertina and guitar. They drank Dominion Ale at the Holding Ground and tried to convince fishermen that whales ensnared in cod nets were not nuisances but wonders.
Soon a 23-year-old British veterinary student joined them.
Michael Moore was on expedition, as students’ research journeys to remote spots were called at the University of Cambridge. He wasn’t certain he wanted to spend his life tending to dogs and cats, as he had assumed he would. Studying whales was a year-long diversion as he wrestled with his career plans.
To the Americans, Moore projected quirky English certitude. He had graduated from Winchester College, an elite boarding school, and was now at Cambridge. He took his tea every day at 4 p.m. He read Thomas Hardy aloud. On his first night aboard the sailboat, as the Americans climbed into their berths in salted dungarees and cable-knit sweaters, Moore opened a leather satchel. He pulled out a pair of striped pajamas so crisp they might still have had Harrods tags attached.
In the mornings Moore and his boat mates woke to the frenzy of gulls feasting on cod stomachs gutted by fishermen after predawn hauls. They pulled on oilskins and ventured into the cold emerald bay with the boat’s hand-cranked engine belching diesel fumes. They chugged around the peninsula for hours watching humpbacks lunge at schools of capelin.
Moore dutifully jotted observations about the whales in his journal and said little to the Americans. They ribbed him for his punctually taken Earl Grey. One afternoon he returned the volley with dry, cordial wit. The Americans were taken aback. Moore had found his way. “Beginning to relax and feel part of the machine,” he wrote in his journal. “There are some real super people around here—all fine and kind and loving.”
From the time of his childhood, Moore had felt somewhat apart. He’d been 12 when his mother told him that his father was manic-depressive. The news stunned him. He’d always thought of his father as a steady rock, a country doctor content with his practice. He’d had no idea that his father was undergoing a grueling course of convulsive shock therapy or that his mother had come upon him after an attempted suicide. The family dynamic now became clear to him: his mother tended his father and his father tended his patients. Alone many afternoons, he wandered from his home down to the railroad tracks, where he kept tabs on a badger family, an experience that steered him to study the animal condition.
Now at last he was on the inside.
His descriptions of the whales grew animated and lively. They were grand, clever, and powerful, the sea’s benign emperors, yet astonishingly vulnerable. One day the researchers came upon a humpback caught in a cod trap under the cliffs. The whale was thrashing in panic. Other humpbacks were circling helplessly. “I need to go in and cut the net,” Moore said as he and the others watched in horror. It would have been reckless; the nets could readily have entangled him too. He was about to dive when other humpbacks helped the whale break free, leaving Moore’s declaration flapping like the flag of an impetuous explorer who had stumbled on something but wasn’t yet sure what it was.
Moore stayed on with the researchers at summer’s end and sailed with them to the humpbacks’ wintering grounds in the Caribbean. As Christmas approached and carols played on Radio Antigua, he thought of his mother. She had died two years earlier. He thought about how burdened she had been by his father’s illness and about the guilt he’d felt for being unable to lighten her load.
One night Moore woke in his berth. He had been dreaming of whales swimming around the coral reef where the boat had anchored. The whales were singing in the dream. As consciousness pushed aside the dream, Moore realized the calls and whistles of the whales were not the stuff of his mind but real and coming through the hull, a chorus of longing and kinship.
Surrounded by the sounds, Moore realized he would spend his life studying, helping, and learning from these creatures.
Bayla was Picasso’s new beginning.
Bayla’s mother had lost a calf in the fall of 2007. It was her first, and it lived only a few months. Researchers don’t know where or why the calf died, but they assumed something catastrophic had happened when Picasso appeared without it. No right whale mother would have abandoned her young before a year spent together.
For Picasso, the death of the baby had to have been wrenching. Right whale mothers are known to swim frantically for days after the death of a calf, searching for the little one no longer at their side.
Researchers spotted Bayla for the first time on January 2, 2009, swimming alongside her mother and a pod of bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Georgia.
Like all right whale encounters, the sighting of Picasso with her days-old calf was a matter of luck. In an era when wild animals are routinely monitored, their every movement documented for years running, whales are the exception. Whales can’t be banded like birds or collared like a wolf, and implanted tags can fail after a short time. The legions of scientists who study them often can only guess their location in the depths.
Researchers catalog sightings in a database painstakingly maintained by the New England Aquarium since 1980. The database distinguishes the whales often by cream-colored skin patches that grow in the same spots where human hair sprouts—on heads, above eyes, chins, and jawlines.
Picasso had been named for the modernistic crosshatch of splotches on her head, the result not of the naturally occurring callosities but of injuries from rope entanglement when she was three years old. The researchers weren’t ready to name her daughter yet. She was still so young. The name Bayla would come years later.
But they noted a distinction: unlike the white chins of some right whales, Bayla’s was onyx black.
&nb
sp; In her first seconds alive, Picasso would have nosed Bayla to the surface for breath—a first tenderness in a year in which she would nurse and cradle and teach Bayla the ways of the sea.
Through the winter researchers saw Bayla and her mother swimming along the coasts of Florida and Georgia, Bayla tucked beside Picasso, safe from great white sharks. The pair began a 1,500-mile trek north as the weather warmed, their boxy bodies and oversized heads moving with unhurried calm, topping out at a poky six miles an hour.
Picasso and Bayla would have crossed shipping lanes off the great ports of the East Coast and swum through the agricultural and industrial runoff of poultry and pork farms in North Carolina and factories in New Jersey and New York. The hazards, documented in accounts including The Urban Whale, a book edited by New England Aquarium researchers Scott Kraus and Rosalind Rolland, increased as they moved north. With every mile the risk of collisions with crab and lobster fishing gear would have grown.
Bayla and her mother likely would have stopped in Cape Cod Bay, where their favored food was plentiful in spring, and would have arrived at their destination in Canadian waters in early summer.
The Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, has among the most dramatic tidal surges in the world. Twice daily, 100 billion tons of seawater rush in and out of the deep rift valley, a result, in native Micmac lore, of a giant whale’s tail splash.
Picasso was a regular in the bay, like many right whales, returning in summer to feast on the bay’s vast quantities of shrimplike copepods, zooplankton rich in nutrients that scientists suspect are gathered there by the force of the tides.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 29