Bayla’s mother would have dived to feast on copepods while Bayla, initially, stayed at the surface.
With a calf’s curiosity, Bayla would have taken stock of her new world with right whales’ black-and-white vision, registering the life around her in varying shades of gray—the swimming mola molas and basking sharks, the petrels and puffins swooping above in a sky often banked in rolling fog. Upon surfacing, her mother would summon Bayla with ascending moos, known as an upcall, until Bayla returned with a swish of her flippers.
On August 27, biologists noted mud on Bayla’s head, a sign of a deep dive—likely a training trip with her mother in the ways of hunting food. Bayla needed to learn well; she was about to enter the most vulnerable period for a right whale. Soon she would be on her own.
After graduation from Cambridge in 1983, Moore moved to Massachusetts, home of Hannah Clark, a forthright music and biology major at Williams College who had been one of his Newfoundland boat mates. The next year they married. Hannah took a job teaching music. Moore enrolled in the MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joint PhD program in biological oceanography.
To his colleagues Moore was cordial and persuasive. His craggy face, long and sincere and shadowed by commanding eyebrows, demanded attention when he spoke, which was often in paragraphs. He smoothly politicked through academic logjams, and a reservoir of patience allowed him to maneuver the government bureaucracy that often held the key to funding.
One of his first grants was to study why fish were developing cancer in Boston Harbor. Sewage turned out to be the cause, which led to more research on the pathogenic origin of marine disease. He began showing up at dolphin and whale strandings, looking for samples to collect.
One day when a whale washed up dead on Cape Cod, Moore arrived with his sample kit. He asked the biologist on site why the animal had died.
“You’re the veterinarian,” said the biologist. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Soon after, Moore began regularly arriving home with a rank smell clinging to his clothes. He had become New England’s default whale coroner, climbing into carcasses up and down the coastline to determine causes of death. Many of the fatalities were right whales. Some had died from ship strikes or disease, but time and again he found the hulking carcasses tangled in fishing rope. He was bewitched by the right whales. They were megaton creatures who could dive 600 feet, survive on food the size of a grain of rice, and bend their enormous selves to scratch their ears with their flukes—and yet they were regularly succumbing to something so prosaic as fishing rope.
In the fall of 1999, Moore got a call from a NOAA researcher. A team in Lubec, Maine, was trying to cut fishing ropes wrapped around a 10-year-old female right whale. They feared infection had set in where the ropes were cutting her. They wanted to try something new. They wanted him to deliver antibiotics to the whale.
But when Moore arrived in Lubec, he could only watch as a team zigzagged across the water trying to catch up to the distressed right whale. The team tagged her trailing ropes with keggers—buoys meant to slow a whale, similar to the kegs whalers once used to make it easier to close in for the kill. The buoys made the whale thrash harder. The water around her turned frothy white. She was bleeding and vomiting. There would be no getting close enough to deliver antibiotics or disentangle her.
The Coast Guard spotted her a month later off the coast of Cape May. She was hanging below the surface. Once in a while she tried to breathe, until she didn’t.
Moore was haunted by the encounter. He couldn’t shake the memory of it. The necropsy report turned his stomach: a gill net had sliced a 4.6-foot-wide laceration across her back and carved off a swath of blubber as it sawed toward her tail. The gash exposed both her shoulder blades. Each flipper was incised down to the bone; the left flipper had a 5-inch deep cut and the right flipper had one 7 inches deep. X-rays showed the ropes had deformed her bones and altered the way she swam. When examiners cut the rope, a sharp snap could be heard as the tension finally released from the whale’s torso.
Moore felt certain the whale had suffered massive pain. For months, maybe years. The last sighting of the whale before entanglement had been two years earlier, in September 1997. It was beyond what he had imagined. The whale drownings in Bay de Verde cod nets that he remembered had been comparatively painless—over in a matter of minutes. This was something else. This, he thought, was torment.
He was a marine biologist. Getting exercised about animal pain was dangerous terrain; in the scientific community he could be derided as emotional and unempirical. But he was also a veterinarian. He had taken an oath to prevent and relieve animal suffering. Right whales were venturing into waters humans had claimed for fishing, and they were dying, like roadkill. There had to be a way for humans to coexist with the right whales. Surely he could harness science to find a fix.
Bayla and her mother were seen a final time together shortly before noon on September 21, 2009, in the Bay of Fundy. Bayla had scars on her left flipper and tail, evidence of ropes she somehow had given the slip. Luck had been with her.
She departed the bay sometime in the fall and was seen socializing with bottlenose dolphins and three other young right whales off the coast of Florida in February. It’s not clear why Bayla made the trip south, since she was too young to be calving.
Then she did another curious thing. She made no appearance in the Bay of Fundy the next summer. Researchers speculate that she went to the summer home of her grandmother—a maverick who slipped the known migratory routines and social patterns of the right whale community to live by her own code, perhaps summering off Iceland.
There’s no real knowing; such is the immensity of the sea and the vastness of what remains unknown about one of the most studied animals in the world.
Figuring out how to stop whales from dying in ropes consumed Moore. Often after dinner with Hannah and the boys, he retreated to his shop, a wood-heated former chicken coop on his island, to theorize.
He wondered if thinner rope might be less injurious, and he directed a student to rig up a machine to test rope widths on blubber. Thinner rope proved more harmful, quicker to cut.
He worked with a Canadian whale biologist to create a model tail, which they used to test a harness they designed. The idea was to wrap the powerful tail of an entangled whale and steady the animal long enough to remove the ropes. In practice, though, the harness didn’t latch.
Moore returned to the idea of antibiotics. Perhaps antibiotics could slow infections from lacerations and give an entangled whale a better chance of survival. He’d had great success measuring the blubber thickness of right whales using pole-mounted ultrasonic probes. Perhaps a pole-mounted syringe and needle could work. But needles proved a different matter. If the syringe failed to release from its holder on the pole, a whale researcher holding the pole could end up attached to an angered whale.
At times it felt like science was working against him. Chemists were creating ropes with the strength of steel. Fishermen were opting for the stronger ropes because they lasted longer on the rocky ocean floors.
Regulators were attempting to solve the problem. In some areas of Massachusetts where right whales congregated, they had banned the use of certain gear, including crab and lobster pots.
For whales, the hazard was the rope that runs from a floating buoy to a trap on the ocean floor and the underwater rope connecting traps in a long chain. Regulators at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration ruled that ropes connecting lobster traps had to sink rather than float, making them less dangerous to swimming whales. Sinking ground rope cost three times as much as the floating rope. It also frayed more rapidly and had to be changed more often, adding up tens of thousands of dollars over a decade for a fisherman.
NOAA also ordered that so-called weak links be used to connect buoys and fishing ropes so that buoys would detach more easily if a whale got entangled. The regulators said the program was a success, pointing out that right whale num
bers had increased from 300 to 450 since regulations were phased in starting in the 1990s.
But to Moore it wasn’t clear the regulations had any impact on entanglement: right whale deaths from entanglement were on track to double between 2000 and 2014, and the deaths from ropes were getting more gruesome as the ropes got stronger, according to New England Aquarium researchers.
The real answer was off the table. Regulators had decided it wasn’t feasible to get rope out of the water column. There was no way they could prohibit lobstering, not in New England. And they had ruled that gear that could free the ocean from ropes—buoys stored on the ocean floor until released by a timer or acoustic signal—was impractical.
Moore believed the regulators could have been bolder had NOAA not also been mandated to consider the economic well-being of industries like fishing that rely on the ocean. Regulators’ intentions were good. They committed generous funding to researchers studying entanglement. But Moore felt that regulators ultimately were handicapped by having to serve the conflicting interests of whales and fishermen.
Moore’s options were dwindling.
Perhaps the answer lay beyond him, he thought. Maybe it would take the market. Whole Foods could take a cue from Massachusetts. Lobsters caught in state waters were sold with whale-logo-stamped green bands on their claws to show that fishermen had used sinking lines to connect their lobster traps. If fishermen adopted additional and more effective whale-safe techniques, chains like Whole Foods could market lobsters as whale-safe, a kind of fair-trade movement for whales.
But Moore didn’t have a clue about where to begin with that. He was a scientist, not a consumer advocate. He had to focus on what he knew.
He had one more idea.
One day in the middle of winter 2006, Moore picked up his phone and dialed a number halfway around the world.
On Christmas Day in 2010, a Florida Fish and Wildlife aerial team was making a regular survey of right whales. Off the coast of Jacksonville they spotted a right whale. Visibility was low. But they could see ropes wrapped tightly around it. Rescue teams deployed. Conditions were so bad rescuers could only attach a tracking device to the end of rope trailing the whale so her location could be followed.
Four days later, when the weather cleared, rescuers found the whale 30 miles south in the St. Augustine Inlet. They tried but couldn’t get good cuts on the rope. The next day they sheared a large loop of rope. But the whale was panicked and evasive and wouldn’t let them get close enough to make the critical cuts to the rope in the whale’s mouth that held the complex weave in place.
New Year’s Day passed. The whale swam north to Fernandina Beach. Rescuers noted the whale was dangerously thin.
Word came back from the New England Aquarium. The whale’s markings matched those of a whale in the right whale catalog.
It was Bayla.
Moore liked the voice he heard on the other end of the phone line that day in 2006. Trevor Austin had a matter-of-fact Kiwi delivery. He was an engineer whose company in New Zealand made equipment for tranquilizing animals.
Moore said he had an idea. He wanted to sedate a free-swimming whale so that rescuers could get close enough, for long enough, to remove ropes entangling it. He needed a ballistic system that would send 60 milliliters of sedative flying through the air with enough force to penetrate a whale’s fibrous blubber with a 12-inch needle.
Austin was silent. The largest-capacity animal syringe held a tenth of what Moore wanted.
“We’ll give it a go,” Austin said.
Moore sent him $25,000 that NOAA had supplied for the project. A year later, on a raw March day, Austin arrived at Logan Airport carrying a black Pelican case packed with anodized aluminum tube syringes, stainless steel needles, and a dart rifle.
Moore and Austin drove to a range on the Cape. Moore had a cooler with three squares of dolphin blubber. Tacked together, they measured the same depth as a right whale’s. Moore perched the blubber against a hay bale.
Austin took a shot. A blank .22 cartridge sent the dart exploding out of the chamber. The dart bounced off the blubber.
Like a bulletproof vest, Austin thought.
Austin fired again. This time the dart entered the blubber but promptly bent in half. Austin and Moore huddled. The syringe’s momentum had continued after the needle entered the blubber, taking the needle along and bending it. The needle needed more resilience. They retreated to Moore’s lab at Woods Hole and glued a carbon fiber tube to the needle’s stainless steel husk.
The next day they drove back to the range. Austin took a shot. A perfect strike.
Moore got a live test case six months later. A mother and calf humpback had gone astray on their migration north and swum 90 miles inland in the Sacramento River Delta, through three bays and past five bridges. They had wounds, likely from a ship’s propeller, and the fresh water was degrading their skin. They needed antibiotics. Moore was called out to California. He loaded the medications into the dart rifle’s syringe. A colleague aimed and fired. Within a week the whales, successfully treated, had regained enough strength to make their way back to the open ocean.
Moore had his device.
On a January day in 2011, Moore was sitting in his office at Woods Hole when the e-mail arrived. Was he available to sedate the calf of Picasso? Yes, he replied. He was on his way.
In a hotel room in New Smyrna, Moore and the fleet of biologists from across Florida, Georgia, and Massachusetts reviewed the details of the operation. The meeting went long and sleep was short, but the next morning Moore’s mind whirred with possibility as the radio of the overhead airplane reported that Bayla was surfacing.
Bayla’s back glistened as it moved across the waterline on the January morning, a black sheath divided by the ropes leading out of her mouth.
The man standing next to Moore on the tower of the Zodiac cocked the dart rifle tipped with the sedative-filled syringe. “We’re live,” Jamison Smith said. Moore was a good shot, but Smith, who helped direct the federal effort to stop whale entanglements, was better. He’d grown up hunting ducks and other waterfowl with four brothers in Florida.
Don’t miss, Moore thought as he gave the command to shoot.
The report was a sharp crack. A splash erupted at the waterline next to Bayla’s torso. An orange buoy tied to the syringe for tracking fell to the water. The buoy jerked, then began moving. The dart was traveling with Bayla.
“The f–ing thing worked,” Moore said, his voice rising and surrendering to surprised wonder.
The radio erupted with excited chatter from the other boats and the overhead plane. As they tracked Bayla diving and surfacing, then diving and surfacing again, elation bubbled. The sedative hadn’t killed her. But there was work yet to do. “Back away,” Moore called to the driver of his boat.
The clock was ticking. The sedation would last 90 minutes.
Soon a more nimble inflatable craft moved in.
The boat was piloted by Chris Slay, a Georgia biologist and motorcycle racer. Mark Dodd, a lifelong surfer and another Georgia biologist, held a carbon-fiber pole fitted with a knife that Slay had designed for cutting tight entanglements like Bayla’s. Instead of a traditional hook that slid under the rope to make a cut, a spring-loaded mechanism sent a blade plunging at the rope from above. Dodd was on his knees, scooted into the bow, like the nose gunner of a B-17.
Dodd and Slay were old hands at freeing whales from ropes. They had pursued entangled whales up and down the Georgia and Florida coasts, at times only to have the whales disappear before they could get a single cut.
Slay motored behind Bayla, guided by two beach-ball-sized orange buoys that had been attached to her trailing fishing ropes that morning. Her pace and cadence had to be understood before the chase could begin. What Slay saw astonished him. Bayla was swimming in a straight line. None of the sharp turns he was used to with right whales dodging rescuers. Every five minutes she came up to breathe. No deep, unpredictable dives.
Sh
e was a perfect target. She was theirs to lose.
Slay gave Dodd the signal. As Bayla surfaced, Slay gunned the motor, closing the distance between Bayla and the boat. Dodd punched the ropes with the knife, but the ropes didn’t give. Slay backed the boat off. They tried again. Another miss.
Something was misaligned, Dodd shouted over the whine of the engine. They couldn’t afford another flawed rally. “I’m not sure anything was cut. Honestly, I’m not sure.”
“Focus as much as you can on exactly where you want to hit it,” Slay said.
The aerial team radioed. Bayla was rising. Dodd leaned over the gunwale. He could see a shadow a few meters off the right bow. “Her bonnet’s right there! She’s coming up. See it right there, Chris?”
Slay opened the throttle. The boat clipped right. Dodd hoisted the knife. Bayla’s head emerged and water cascaded down her sides. A spangled spray of phlegmy blow blasted Dodd’s eyes and nose.
Fundamentals, Dodd thought.
He pictured the matrix of ropes, their loops and twists. As the spray cleared, the ropes appeared and were level with his face. He heaved forward with a grunt and thrust the pole.
If Bayla felt anything, she gave no indication. But before the force of the strike repelled him to the floor of the boat, Dodd glimpsed the ropes slacken.
Slay whipped his head around. Two orange balls bobbed in place behind the boat.
“The buoys are dead in the water,” Slay said.
The ropes had fallen free.
As the sun descended, the inflatables steered into harbor. Fatigue was settling. There would be time later for the team to deconstruct the day’s success, but Moore needed to know one thing. He approached Slay.
“Did the sedation make a difference?” Moore asked.
Slay smiled. “Hell yes.”
For six days Moore’s e-mail pinged with daily updates on Bayla’s coordinates as she swam south down the Florida coast. The information came from a temporary satellite tag that the disentangling team had attached.
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015 Page 30