War of the Whales: A True Story

by Joshua Horwitz

  After exchanging a curt nod, they let loose a wild war cry and thrashed through the water toward the boat. They managed to keep the head above the water, but two of the sharks darted in to grab at bits of flesh that splattered into the shallows.

  “On two!” Balcomb shouted as they drew close to the boat. “One . . .” They didn’t wait for two. With a heave, they rolled the head above the gunwale and into the boat. Then they dove in after it.

  They both looked down instinctively to confirm that their feet and legs were intact. All clear. But Balcomb knew they weren’t out of danger yet. Once—during a walrus count off Round Island, Alaska—he’ d been inside another inflatable boat that was reduced to flaps by an angry bull walrus when it attacked the boat and punctured all the forward tubes. He shivered at the thought of what would happen if the sharks started to bite into this one. Rolling to his knees, he lowered the engine into the water and yanked it to life.

  The boat roared away from shore, pointing dead ahead for Les Adderly’s bait freezer.

  10:00 P.M.

  Sandy Point

  Balcomb had to fly to Grand Bahama in the morning to meet Ketten’s flight, and he desperately needed some shut-eye. But first he wanted to check online to see if anything had been posted about the stranding.

  Traditionally, cetacean field researchers were scattered as far and wide as the animals they studied, tracking belugas and bowheads in the Arctic, river dolphins in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, right whales on the Atlantic Coast, grays on the Pacific Seaboard, vaquita porpoises in the Sea of Cortez, and humpbacks migrating toward both poles in search of krill. Other researchers were based in academic labs on every continent. At one- or two-year intervals, those who could afford to travel would meet at international conferences to share their research and whale tales. Otherwise they toiled in far-flung isolation, communicating mostly through articles published in academic journals.

  The internet changed all that.

  In 1993 the University of Victoria in Canada established the first international Listserv for researchers and wildlife managers working with marine mammals. Overnight, decades of pent-up conversation bubbled over online. The marine mammal Listserv, known as MARMAM, became the town square for posting research data, conferences and speaker announcements, grant queries, job notices, rumors, and gossip. Heated debates broke out from time to time, but, for the most part, MARMAM was a forum for informed conversation among hundreds, and then thousands, of researchers, bureaucrats, and animal protection activists around the globe.

  On the night of March 17, Balcomb logged on to MARMAM to find that neither the Bahamian nor US Fisheries departments had posted anything about the stranding. No scientists anywhere had. Balcomb stared at the screen. He pulled the prints of the USS Caron out of his desk drawer. He stared at photos of the Blainville’s, its severed head matted with flies. Then he started to type.

  Post to:

  MARMAM Newsgroup

  “Just the facts, ma’am,” Balcomb intoned quietly. “No need to editorialize.” He continued typing.

  From:

  Ken Balcomb, Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey, Abaco, Bahamas

  Subject:

  Whale Strandings in the Bahamas Islands

  Date:

  17 March 2000

  The following is a summary of whale and dolphin stranding events in the northern Bahama Islands during March 15, 2000. We were directly involved in assisting with rescue or necropsy during nine of these events and can document them in some detail.

  He methodically detailed the location and time and species of each of the reported strandings based on the logs they had compiled over the past three days. Then he added a final paragraph:

  It is worth noting that we have been gathering reports of marine mammal strandings, and have been conducting field studies of living marine mammals in the Bahama Islands since 1991; the stranding rate of cetaceans is typically on the order of one or two reported per year in the entire island chain. Beaked whale strandings are particularly rare.

  When he was finished, Balcomb reread his entry twice. He took a breath and exhaled. Then he clicked the Submit Post button.

  7

  “Unusual Mortality Event”

  A whale on a beach has always been a mystery that cried out for explanation. Ancient coastal dwellers from the South Pacific to the Bering Sea interpreted strandings as a bounty of food and other blessings sent to them by their gods. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle remarked on the conundrum of beached whales in his Historia Animalium: “It is not known for what reason they run themselves aground on dry land; at all events it is said that they do so at times, and for no obvious reason.”

  Millennia later, at the end of the twentieth century, marine scientists were still pondering the question Why do whales strand? And why do they sometimes strand en masse?

  Many theories had been advanced, none of them definitive. Since toothed whales and dolphins are particularly prone to stranding, researchers looked to possible sources of biosonar navigational errors. One hypothesis suggested that echolocating whales have trouble discerning gently sloping coastlines, which would explain mass-stranding hot spots such as Ocean Beach in Tasmania and Western Australia’s Geographe Bay.

  Baleen whales—such as humpbacks, grays, fins, and blues—follow long migration paths and are believed to navigate by magnetically tracking iron deposits in the earth’s crust. Some researchers speculate that when earthquakes rearrange the tectonic plates in the ocean floor, misaligned veins of iron ore can misdirect migrating whales into shore.

  Whales that hunt close to shore are the most likely to run aground—though paradoxically, killer whales that hunt sea lions in the shallows rarely do. The strong social bonds of certain species, such as pilot whales, have led some scientists to embrace a “follow me” theory of mass strandings: pods that hunt close together, often following a lead animal, might strand when the leader is caught in a strong onshore current.

  One fact is not in dispute: whales and dolphins have been stranding for as long as they’ve lived in the oceans. Most of them die at sea, either from old age or disease, and then wash ashore with the tide. Occasionally they strand alive, usually alone, sometimes in groups. For the vast majority of whales that strand alive, the beach is their final destination.

  When Congress passed the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, it assigned Fisheries the task of enforcing its provisions and determining if any laws, civil or criminal, had been violated. Any marine mammal that stranded on US shores or nearby coastlines immediately became the property of Fisheries for investigative purposes. But Congress never properly funded its marine mammal mission, and Fisheries was none too eager to embrace it—especially when fishing and marine mammal interests conflicted. Until the 1970s, the agency’s central focus had been managing the country’s fishing stocks for the benefit of American fishing interests. When dolphins became ensnared in tuna fishermen’s nets, or when orcas competed with fishermen for Chinook salmon, it was Fisheries’ job to untangle the legal and commercial threads. In the minds of many Fisheries administrators, whales would always be “fish out of water” at their agency.

  But the same public that had pressed Congress to pass the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passionate about saving whales and other marine mammals. Volunteer stranding response groups quickly sprang up along American coastlines to alert Fisheries of stranded animals. By the late 1990s, Fisheries was coordinating over 100 local groups of volunteers inside its National Stranding Response Network.

  Most citizens volunteered in hopes of rescuing stranded whales from the beach. In reality, relatively few marine mammals strand alive, and most that do end up dying on the beach. In 1999 approximately 1,500 marine mammals—including whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, and manatees—beached on US shorelines. All but 200 of them had already died at sea, mostly from disease or old age. Of the 200 that stranded alive, some were euthanized on the beach by Fisheries officials. Most of the others soon
died of exposure to the elements, or suffocated when their bodies collapsed under their own weight, or drowned when the high tide washed over their blowholes. Only five marine mammals that stranded alive that year were actually rescued from the beach and returned to the ocean.

  In the case of most strandings, Fisheries’ primary job was to safely dispose of the bodies. A dead whale was an ideal environment for anaerobic microorganisms and can quickly become a biohazard. Beyond containing the immediate health risks associated with active bacteria, Fisheries faced the engineering task of removing gigantic carcasses from the beach. It costs tens of thousands of dollars in manpower and heavy equipment to dismember, remove, and dispose of a single large whale.

  Beyond beach cleanup, it was also Fisheries’ responsibility to sort out the whys and wherefores of any “unusual mortality event,” or UME, as defined by the Marine Mammal Protection Act: “a stranding that is unexpected; involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population; and demands immediate response.”

  In response to a stranding it designated as “unusual,” Fisheries would dispatch one of a small roster of marine mammal pathologists to the scene to investigate, perform a necropsy on-site, and recover evidence for laboratory analysis. Fisheries investigations sometimes became crime scenes whose evidence trails led to prosecutions. If, for instance, a hunter or a hooligan had used a harbor porpoise for target practice, a pathologist with the right training and equipment could compile a complete ballistics profile.

  As human development increasingly encroached on marine habitats, more whales and dolphins turned up dead or dying on beaches. Many drowned after becoming entangled in fishing nets and floating plastic refuse. Fatalities from collisions with commercial ships and recreational boats increased year by year. And runoff from agriculture fertilizer created toxic, sometimes lethal, algae blooms that passed up the food chain, from zooplankton, to fish, and, finally, to whales and other marine mammals.

  Despite the rise in marine mammal deaths from human activity, Fisheries had designated relatively few strandings as “unusual mortality events.” From 1991, when the UME investigative program was initiated, until the Bahamas stranding in 2000, fewer than 20 events had been so classified, and most of those involved seals and dolphins. To date, Fisheries had resisted classifying any whale deaths connected to naval exercises as unusual. While the investigative pathologists were civilians working at academic research labs like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, those same labs and researchers were usually funded by the Office of Naval Research. The potential for conflicts of interest was ubiquitous.

  The first suggestion of a possible link between naval exercises and mass whale strandings emerged in 1991 when two European researchers wrote a letter to the correspondence section of the journal Nature titled “Whales and the Military.”1 The authors noted that three recent mass strandings of whales in the Canary Islands in 1985, 1988, and 1989 coincided with nearby NATO naval exercises. It was such a small and speculative item—more a curiosity than a finding—that few cetologists took notice.

  It wasn’t until the Greek stranding in May 1996 that the wider community of marine mammal scientists seriously considered a connection between mass strandings and naval sonar exercises. On May 11, NATO naval forces began antisubmarine training exercises at the edge of the three-mile-deep Hellenic Trench in the Ionian Sea. On May 12, a dozen Cuvier’s beaked whales stranded on nearby beaches. Because it was peak tourist season and many of the strandings occurred on resort beaches, local officials quickly buried most of the dead whales.

  Several days later, Dr. Alexandros Frantzis, a Greek veterinarian from the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute, exhumed and examined 11 of the whales, 9 of which were immature males. He supervised limited necropsies of the partially decayed animals. But as Frantzis explained in a paper he subsequently published in the journal Nature, “No ears were collected, no entire organs or histological samples were conserved because of problems related to permits, lack of facilities and means, and lack of relevant knowledge and trained specialists. In photos taken at the time, four of the whales were bleeding from the eyes.”2

  Because the stranding happened in plain sight of tourists, and because of Frantzis’ independent inquiry, NATO was forced to investigate. Experts were assembled from around the world, including an ONR delegation selected by Gisiner and led by Darlene Ketten from Woods Hole. The investigators examined the full range of possible causes such as underground earthquakes, magnetic anomalies, major pollution events, and conventional military exercises. All possible causes were eliminated—except for the midfrequency and Low Frequency Active sonar exercises NATO had conducted in close proximity to the strandings. However, the final NATO report found no conclusive evidence of a direct causal link between the exercises and the strandings. Stating that “the adverse effect of sonar on marine mammals has been poorly studied,” the NATO investigators called for further research.3

  Like other researchers around the world, Balcomb followed the accounts on MARMAM and in scientific journals. Over the next three years, two other “unusual” strandings were reported in the presence of NATO exercises—one in the Mediterranean Sea and one in the deep ocean trench along the Canary Islands. Two other strandings occurred on or near US naval bases in the Caribbean. But no independent researchers had been able to retrieve fresh-enough specimens to establish a conclusive causal link.

  Coming just a few years after the Greek stranding, Balcomb’s report of a mass stranding in the Bahamas set off alarm bells at Fisheries and Navy offices up and down the East Coast. Hours after Balcomb first called Gisiner at ONR, the regional stranding coordinator at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Miami heard about the stranded dolphin on Powell Cay and the whales that had stranded on Grand Bahama.

  The Southeast office was the first-response center for any strandings in the Caribbean, including the half dozen US naval bases on the islands. Even though the stranding occurred in Bahamian waters, it was inside Fisheries’ jurisdiction, which extended 200 miles offshore. The regional stranding coordinator in Miami knew that processing the paperwork to get an investigative team on the ground would likely crawl through the Bahamian bureaucracy on “island time”—and time was the most perishable element in any stranding investigation. A more daunting hurdle would be negotiating with the US Navy—if the stranding turned out to involve American naval assets or exercises.

  In the past few years, the Navy had obstructed investigations by Fisheries’ Southeast Regional Office of strandings on and around its bases. When a whale stranded in Puerto Rico, the Navy handed over the carcass to a local veterinarian. Darlene Ketten flew down from Woods Hole to examine the head, but the vet denied her access until the specimen had decayed for a week, and then he refused to let her take the head back to the States for CT scanning. A year later, when four beaked whales stranded in the US Virgin Islands during naval exercises, the US Navy rebuffed all efforts by the Southeast Office to investigate.

  The mass stranding in the Bahamas was of a different order of magnitude. It wasn’t just the number of animals involved, but also the number of different species and the extended geographical area. Fisheries didn’t have the money or resources to properly investigate a mass stranding across five or six islands. At least the regional office didn’t. So the Miami office was only too happy to pass the whole mess up to the chain to the national stranding coordinator at Fisheries headquarters: Teri Rowles. Then it would be headquarters’ investigation to manage, and it would be Rowles’ job to wrestle the bears in the navy blue suits.

  DAY 3: MARCH 17, 2000

  National Marine Fisheries Service Headquarters, Silver Spring, Maryland

  By the time the Southeast office called Teri Rowles, she’ d already heard about the Bahamian strandings from Bob Gisiner at ONR. Rowles and Gisiner had agreed that there needed to be an investigation, though they deferred discussion of whether to designate it an unusual mortality event. They both wanted Darlene Ketten to lead t
he investigative team, which would also include someone from the Southeast Fisheries office and someone from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Rowles would manage the logistics and paperwork, and Gisiner agreed to cover the up-front costs. Rowles promised to do her best to find money to reimburse ONR, but it was a little bit like a secretary offering to go dutch with her boss at an expense-account restaurant. Gisiner was used to picking up the tab for stranding investigations, because he could afford to—and because he wanted to stay involved on the Navy’s behalf.

  To an outside observer, Fisheries and ONR might seem like unlikely investigative partners. By statute, Fisheries was charged with enforcing the Navy’s compliance with marine mammal protection laws. Whenever the Navy planned to conduct exercises that might “harm or harass” marine mammals—as defined under the Marine Mammal Protection Act—the Navy was supposed to apply for permits from Fisheries. And if the Navy was involved in a marine mammal injury or death, Fisheries was supposed to investigate the incident.

  But in the real world, Fisheries didn’t have the budget, personnel, or expertise to properly evaluate Navy permit applications, much less to conduct investigations of mass strandings. Fisheries employed many marine biology experts at its regional offices. But ONR funded almost all the best marine acousticians, pathologists, and whale and dolphin researchers, whether they were based inside ONR, at Navy labs, or at academic research institutes across the country and around the world. The mismatch between the size of ONR’s and Fisheries’ research staffs was reflected in the 30–1 disparity in their annual budgets—which in turn mirrored their political muscle on Capitol Hill.