Balcomb had been chasing after various species of beaked whales for most of his life.* As a teenaged beachcomber in California, he’ d thought of beaked whales as emissaries from the distant past: modern dinosaurs that jealously guarded the secrets of their evolutionary journey from the Eocene Age. He’ d walked countless miles of coastline in search of bone fragments, hoping to piece together small skeletal sections, waded knee-deep through piles of discarded organs outside whaling stations on four continents, searching for some anatomical prize tucked away inside—a tusk or a vertebra or, the rarest of treasures, a skull. In his twenties, he’ d begun photographing beaked whales during whale survey expeditions in the Pacific. For a dozen winters, he’ d sailed a tall ship along the Atlantic Seaboard, charting whale migrations and searching for beaked whales from Newfoundland to the Dominican Republic.
For the past ten seasons, he and Claridge had staked out a “species hot spot” in the Great Bahama Canyon, waiting with loaded cameras in small boats to photograph and videotape, classify and catalogue the resident community of Cuvier’s and Blainville’s beaked whales. But until the morning of March 15, 2000, he had never touched a live beaked whale. And now, right at his feet, lay a living, breathing specimen. For a hardcore bone-hunting beachcomber like Balcomb, this was an embarrassment of riches. An intact beaked whale that could provide a window into its functional anatomy, and a complete skeleton!
Balcomb was a realist. He knew that most whales that strand alive don’t survive. By the time a whale comes ashore, too much has already gone wrong. Stranding is simply too severe a trauma for most whales to sustain. If he pushed this one back out to sea in such shaky condition, the sharks would likely tear it to pieces before it traversed the two-mile gauntlet of shallows and reached the safety of the canyon depths. He considered the possibility of ushering the whale alongside a boat to the nearby lagoon. If it died, he could harvest the organs, fix them in formaldehyde, and ship the skeleton up to Jim Mead, the marine mammal curator at the Smithsonian Institution. Even Mead had never collected a complete Cuvier’s skeleton.
Balcomb crouched down in the water beside the whale. It was about 16 feet long; average for an immature male Cuvier’s. He could tell its sex and approximate age from the distinctive pair of slightly protruding lower tusks that are visible only in males. Balcomb leaned in close to get a whiff of his breath. It smelled fine, not putrid like a sick whale’s would be. And he wasn’t wasted away by ear parasites, a common affliction of stranded whales.
The whale certainly looked healthy. His eyes weren’t dilated, and he didn’t show any outward signs of a ship collision that would have caused a concussion or brain damage. The whale’s right eye gazed steadily back at him, signaling—what? Confusion? Fear? How the hell could he tell? He was a whale researcher, not a mind reader. He’ d never made close eye contact with a beaked whale before. Had anyone?
“What in the world are you doing here?” Balcomb asked aloud. He laid a hand gently on the whale’s back. Its skin was as soft and smooth as an inner tube. It still felt cool to the touch, not overheated or dehydrated. That would change in a hurry if they couldn’t get him off the beach. Balcomb noted the position of the sun, already well above the horizon line and climbing. He rocked the whale to one side and examined the fresh scratches along its belly, probably from the nearby coral reef. Just a thin strand of blood hanging in the water. Nothing life threatening, so long as the sharks didn’t pick up the scent.
That’s when he saw the rake marks across the whale’s flank and the cookie-cutter scars on his dorsal fin. For a decade, their team had been photo-identifying the local beaked whales by their unique scarring patterns. Torso scrapes were from the jagged canyon walls or else souvenir tooth rakes from sparring matches among bulls during mating season. The distinctive scar pattern on the dorsal fins came from encounters with small cookie-cutter sharks that feed on their prey by gouging tiny round plugs, as if cut out with a cookie cutter.
Cuvier’s beaked whales dive to depths of greater than a mile for more than an hour at a time, surfacing only briefly to breathe. Individual Cuvier’s beaked whales can be identified by the scratches on their backs and dorsal fins from mating competitions.
Blainville’s beaked whales are smaller than Cuvier’s, but have similar diving and hunting behaviors. The “beak” refers to the rostrum or snout of the whale, which is elongated rather than blunt-headed. Individual identification, once considered impossible, is facilitated by the light oval scars from the bites of cookie-cutter sharks.
Balcomb recognized the pattern from a photo he’ d shot two weeks earlier. “Look at this,” he said to Ellifrit, who stood watch for sharks in the shallows.
Ellifrit crouched down next to Balcomb. “Zc-34, right?” he said. “We ID’ d him off of South Point. Last month.”
“That’s what I think. Yeah, definitely.” Balcomb and Claridge assigned their research subjects alphanumeric identifiers, according to their species and social rank in the pod. Zc stood for the Cuvier’s scientific name: Ziphius cavirostris. They weren’t interested in giving them cute and cuddly names, as if they were house pets. Balcomb and Claridge were serious scientists, not whale huggers.
But now that Balcomb had recognized the animal and remembered the afternoon when they’ d patiently tracked him through three dives and ascents before finally grabbing a clear-enough photo to make a positive ID . . . now it was impossible to see him as just a skeleton surrounded by organs and blubber. Balcomb snapped out of his fantasy of collecting a complete beaked whale specimen and began working to dislodge Zc-34 from the beach.
He scanned the water’s surface for sharks. No problems on that front. Yet. The Earthlings stood around in a loose semicircle on the beach, looking as disoriented as the whale. Ten minutes earlier they’ d been sipping coffee and wondering if they’ d applied enough sunscreen for the day’s outing. They didn’t understand what was happening, and no one was stopping to explain it to them. Balcomb couldn’t make sense of it himself. All he knew was that this whale was in the wrong place, going in the wrong direction, and if he didn’t get him back to deep water in a hurry, he would die here on the beach.
“Get out of the water, before some shark shows up,” Balcomb said to Ellifrit. “And keep the Earthwatchers on the beach. I’m going to try to dig this guy out of here.” He reached underneath the whale’s belly and scooped out handfuls of wet sand and shells. If he cut his hands on coral or shells, it would only bring the sharks in faster. So he worked slowly, handful by handful, to excavate a trench beneath the whale. Claridge, who routinely videotaped everything of documentary significance in their survey, stood just outside the water’s edge and kept recording.
After ten minutes of digging, Balcomb had created enough space beneath the whale’s belly to rock him slightly from side to side. It was exhausting work, like dislodging a car from a deep snowbank. Even at age 60, Balcomb still had strong legs and muscular arms, but each time he heaved his body against the whale, he barely budged. Finally, a small wave washed in, buoying the whale and allowing Balcomb to pivot his body to face out toward deeper water. He steadied the whale upright in the water and then slowly withdrew his arms to make sure the animal could keep himself level. He pushed-walked the whale into chest-deep water and then gave him a strong shove in the direction of the canyon.
The Earthlings cheered from the shore. The whale fluked once or twice toward the open water—only to make a wide left turn and head back to shore. The Earthlings groaned. Claridge handed the camera to Ellifrit to continue recording while she joined Balcomb in the water. Together they tried in vain to block the whale’s path back to the beach as his belly lodged in the sand once more. Something was desperately wrong with this whale’s compass, Balcomb concluded. Either that, or something back in the canyon had totally freaked him out.
For the next half hour, they kept pushing the whale back out to deeper water, only to watch him circle back to shore and try to strand. Claridge had al
ways been the strongest swimmer on their team, often trolling in the water behind their survey boat to videotape the whales underwater. Now, with Balcomb blocking the path back to the beach, Claridge swam out alongside the whale until they were 200 feet from shore, in 15 feet of water. Finally, the whale dove and disappeared from sight.1
They were still watching to make sure he didn’t circle back to the beach when a local fisherman motored by in a small skiff. “Ken!” he shouted. “There’s a whale stranded down at Rocky Point!”
That was a mile south. Claridge stayed behind to keep an eye out for the Cuvier’s, while Balcomb and Ellifrit divided the Earthlings between one of the motorboats and the back of the red pickup. Balcomb jumped into the cab and sped down the beach.
Balcomb could see the stranded animal as they approached Rocky Point. It was perched on a coral shelf that was completely exposed in the low tide. As he approached on foot, he could tell it was another Cuvier’s. Another adolescent male. He’ d probably beached there an hour or so earlier and stranded as the tide receded. This one was bleeding badly from the jagged coral cuts, and sharks were already circling offshore from the reef. Two tiger sharks, at first glance, plus a bull shark, and a few smaller nurse sharks. The seven-foot tigers and the bull could be fierce when there was blood in the water. The smaller nurse sharks would hang back till the big guys were done, and then swoop in to pick at whatever was left.
Balcomb figured he could manage the sharks, at least while the whale was on dry land. The bigger problem would be keeping the whale hydrated and protected from the sun for the next few hours until the tide came back in and they could float him out to deeper water. Even on a cloudy day, a stranded whale quickly becomes overheated and sunburned, and then dies of dehydration. On this spring morning in the Bahamas, there was barely a cloud in the sky.
As warm-blooded mammals, whales evolved an elegant system of internal heat regulation to maintain a 98-degree body temperature when swimming below the Arctic ice pack or hunting in the 40-degree waters of the ocean depths. Below a thick layer of insulating blubber, their closely packed circulatory system allows the warm blood in their arteries to heat the cold blood in adjacent veins—a biological example of “countercurrent exchange” that has been mimicked in many industrial systems. But the most pressing biological challenge for whales isn’t staying warm, it’s how to dump enough heat through their skin, mouth, and tongue to maintain a constant body temperature below 100 degrees. When a whale strands in the tropical sun, it overheats and dies within hours.
Balcomb dispatched the Earthlings to scavenge as many sheets, towels, and buckets as they could find from the brightly colored houses scattered along the beach. Ten minutes later, they had the Cuvier’s wrapped from fluke to blowhole, with a bucket brigade keeping the fabric soaked in seawater. Four of the Earthlings held a sheet overhead as a canopy to shield the whale from the midmorning sun.
Balcomb heard the radio crackling from the pickup. It was Claridge, reporting that yet another beaked whale, a Blainville’s, had stranded back up the coast, northeast of their house. Balcomb left Ellifrit in charge of the Earthlings contingent and climbed into the pickup.
“Something is going on,” Balcomb thought as he barreled back toward Sandy Point. “Something big.”
He called a neighbor on the radio and asked him to paddle two kayaks out to Sandy Point. By the time he arrived, three of his neighbors had dislodged the Blainville’s from the beach and were standing beside him in the shallows. Balcomb and Claridge waded out to photograph the whale and scrape DNA skin samples for later identification. When the kayakers arrived, they helped guide the animal back out to deep water. Balcomb asked the kayakers to meet them back at Rocky Point as soon as they could paddle out there. As they drove past their house, Balcomb and Claridge ran in to grab a blue poly tarp from the garage.
By the time they returned to Rocky Point, the tide had moved back in—and so had the sharks. A lemon shark and what looked liked two tigers had joined the fray. To judge by the position of the sun, Balcomb figured it was close to high noon. A cluster of young Bahamian schoolgirls dressed in starched blue and white uniforms had stopped on their way home for lunch to watch.
The whale was still alive, though his breathing seemed to Balcomb to be heavy and forced. Meanwhile, the Earthwatch volunteers were beginning to fray around the edges. They had come to the Bahamas to photograph whales, not to stand by helplessly and watch them die of dehydration or be devoured by sharks. Two college-aged volunteers were kneeling by the whale’s head, trying to soothe him with gentle strokes and murmurs. Another one, a middle-aged woman from Cincinnati, swatted flies away from an angry scrape on his tail fluke. She was sobbing quietly to herself but wiped away her tears when Claridge approached with the tarp. The sight of dorsal fins circling in the water just offshore wasn’t helping morale.
Earthwatch team and neighbors with a second stranded Cuvier’s beaked whale at Rocky Point, March 15, 2000.
Balcomb threw Claridge a look that she recognized as “You’re the den mother here. I’m the guy who keeps the boats running.” But she had more pressing business to tend to. She crouched low to examine the coral cuts on the whale’s belly, which were starting to congeal and clot. A promising sign, unless it meant he was dehydrating. At least his eyes were still clear. She collected a skin-scrape sample and peeled back a towel to study the scarring on his flank. “Zc-12,” she said as Balcomb photographed the dorsal fin from both sides.
The kayaks arrived, and Balcomb motioned to them to stop offshore on the far side of the shark swirl. Now Claridge took charge of the Earthlings. “Who knows how to shoot video?” she called. One of the younger women raised her hand. “Okay, get the camera from the truck and run tape, with time-code stamp. And stay out of the water when you’re shooting. You four, lose that canopy and help me with this tarp. The rest of you gather some pieces of driftwood up there,” she said, pointing toward a nearby house. “Something you can swing like a bat.”
Claridge peeled back the wet towels and sheets with the tenderness of a mother removing a child’s Band-Aid. She examined the animal for other wounds, but found none. Then she unrolled the large blue tarp. She and Balcomb and Ellifrit drew the edge of the tarp underneath the whale’s head. As the Earthlings rocked the whale from side to side, they worked the tarp up under his trunk.
Ellifrit handed out driftwood clubs to three of the bravest-looking souls and hefted one himself. “Beat the water in front of the whale as we move him out,” Balcomb directed them. “Dave will show you how. Fan out in a semicircle. The sharks aren’t interested in you, unless your feet are bleeding, so check them now for cuts, and watch out for the coral.”
Ellifrit led the three Earthlings out into the water, thrashing the surface as hard as they could and shouting as they went. Claridge and Balcomb, alongside four more Earthlings, grabbed hold of the blue tarp.
“Now lift and drag,” Claridge commanded. “Just a few feet at a time.” The tarp made a nasty tearing sound against the coral. “I said lift!”
In a moment, they were off the ledge and half hauling, half floating the whale through the shallows. The kayakers beat their paddles in the water to disrupt the sharks, which scattered, then quickly regrouped. The sharks maintained a constant distance, circling and darting in feints toward the whale, but eventually giving way in front of the V formation of wildly thrashing beaters. The kayaks fell in beside the tarp bearers, creating a floating barrier between the sharks and the whale.
When they pulled the tarp out from under the whale, he listed slowly to the left. Balcomb and Claridge propped him up on opposite sides, as if he were a drunken sailor.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Seems kind of wobbly,” he said. “But he’s not bleeding. Anyway, we’re out of time.”
“Right. Let’s give him a go, then.”
They eased him ahead into open water. The whale hung in the water, not moving forward, but not listing to the side, either.
Ellifrit ran over and gave him a final shove from behind. “Get outahere!”
The whale moved his fluke weakly up and down, ducked his head, and dove. Balcomb held his breath as he watched him fluking away in the direction of the canyon. It occurred to him that he’ d never seen a beaked whale swim in the shallows, until today. Was that a normal fluking action? Was he actually heading back to the canyon, or was he simply swimming away from the commotion of sharks and humans?
He waited and watched. Nothing. Nothing was good.
Claridge tugged at his T-shirt. “Let’s get out of the water,” she said.
They didn’t talk on the short drive back to the house. It was past 1:00 p.m., and Claridge was fielding calls on the truck’s VHF radio. Reports were still coming in of other strandings on nearby cays. Two whales, probably minkes, had stranded alive near Royal Island, 25 miles to the southeast. A beaked whale mother and calf had come ashore two hours ago on a small cay near Grand Bahama, 60 miles northwest of their house. The calf was already dead. It was unprecedented—and unexplainable.
Balcomb knew it was time to make a call.
* * *
* More than 25 percent of the 78 whale species are beaked whales, though only a few species of beaked whales have been well studied.
2
Castaways
DAY 1: MARCH 15, 2000, 1:30 P.M.
Sandy Point, Abaco Island, the Bahamas
Back in the house at Sandy Point, Balcomb rifled his desk drawers for Bob Gisiner’s business card. He distinctly remembered Gisiner handing him his Office of Naval Research card at the Society for Marine Mammalogy conference in Maui, Hawaii, back in December. Balcomb had thrown it into some drawer along with all the other cards he collected that week. Now where was it?
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 2