She was despondent but, as always, resourceful. As long as she was at a major medical center, she reasoned, she might as well study anatomy—cetacean anatomy. In the absence of live subjects, Darlene studied specimens harvested from stranded marine mammals around the country. One day someone sent her a block of frozen tissue containing a sperm whale ear. She was new to whale anatomy and didn’t know where or how to begin her dissection. When she asked the head of the radiology department if she could use their X-ray machine to take a look inside the tissue block, he suggested she try their new computerized tomography (CT) scanner.
Computerized tomography was a breakthrough technology in 1980. Conventional X-rays produce two-dimensional images on film. CT scanners take thousands of thinly sliced digital X-rays of a three-dimensional object, then compose those X-rays into a 3-D composite model of bone and tissue—the same way you might reconstruct a sliced salami into its original shape. And unlike magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), CT scans can precisely image tissue, fat, bone, and blood as distinct structures.
Watching that first block of sperm whale tissue move through the scanner bed and appear magically on the screen as a fully rendered ear bone was Ketten’s eureka moment. The scanner could actually see through the tissue and the protective ear bone to reveal the underlying structures of the whale’s inner ear. There was the graceful spiral of the cochlea, as if sculpted out of Italian marble! Ketten realized that she was standing on the edge of an entirely new frontier in medical pathology: digital dissection. No longer would scientists have to destroy a delicate specimen in order to reveal its anatomy or the pathology of its injury.
She convinced the radiology department to let her use the CT scanner after the medical clinic closed each night. By the time she completed her PhD thesis, she’ d mapped the inner ear anatomy of 16 species of toothed whales, including harbor porpoises, dolphins, and sperm whales. Her CT models demonstrated how each species had evolved its own specialized auditory structures to hear specific frequencies and wavelengths, depending on the demands of its respective hunting environment.2
Darlene Ketten prepares a minke whale for CT scanning at the CSI Computerized Scanning and Imaging facility she directs at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Unfortunately, by earning a PhD in experimental radiology and neuroethology, Ketten effectively specialized herself into unemployment. Whale hearing was endlessly fascinating to her but too esoteric to attract a postdoctoral research or teaching fellowship. It wasn’t until Harvard Medical School launched its first human cochlear implant program—and needed a radiologist who specialized in CT scanning of inner ears—that Ketten found her academic niche.
For the next five years, she conducted human hearing studies at Harvard and moonlighted as a nonfaculty whale ear researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic. Harvard, like Hopkins, let her use its CT scanners after clinic hours, so most weeks she ferried specimens back and forth between Woods Hole and Cambridge.
Beginning in the early 1990s, soon after he arrived at ONR, Bob Gisiner became the patron who would sponsor Ketten’s cetacean research. The Navy also sent her to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Maryland, for formal training in forensic pathology. It was a natural fit. She appreciated the order that forensic protocol imposed on the chaos and incongruity of a whale on a beach. She felt she owed her volunteer subjects that level of dignity in death.
As her experience and reputation grew, Ketten found herself downstream from a steady flow of stranded cetaceans, large and small, who’ d met untimely and often mysterious deaths. Increasingly, it fell to her to make a differential diagnosis among the possible causes of cetacean demise that read like a biblical litany: death by ship strike, by net entanglement, by gunshot wound, by underwater explosion, by swallowed plastic bags, by toxic algae bloom, by parasitic infestation, by seismic or acoustic shock.
By the late 1990s, with joint appointments to the faculties of Harvard Medical School and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Ketten had all the requisite assets to excel at forensic pathology: a ravenous curiosity for solving puzzles combined with a passion for detail. She worked hard, wrote well, and published often. She was a gifted, witty teacher who could speak with equal eloquence to lay and professional audiences. And like every good forensic scientist, she was relentless in her search for conclusive evidence. She scoffed at colleagues who published papers based on two or three specimens—a common practice, given the dearth of research subjects. If she didn’t have enough data to publish conclusively, she waited for enough volunteers to prove or disprove her hypothesis. She sometimes ruffled feathers by being a stickler for protocol. Balcomb had once seen her stand up at the end of a colleague’s presentation and, in front of hundreds of peers, state matter-of-factly, “I think it’s important that everyone understand, before they accept your conclusions, that you refrigerated your specimens at thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit rather than the optimal storage environment of thirty-five degrees.”
Regardless of her occasional lapses in professional tact, by 2000 Ketten had secured her status as the go-to whale coroner in the aftermath of an atypical stranding. Her competitors for access to the limited supply of stranded specimens included colleagues at Woods Hole and around the world: zoologists, veterinarians, paleontologists, marine biologists, and toxicologists, as well as hordes of ambitious graduate students. In the area of acoustic trauma and whale ear pathology, Ketten was the unassailable expert. Free from the constraints of marriage and family, she could board a plane on a moment’s notice, bound for whichever far-flung coastline where her services were required.
If you were Bob Gisiner at ONR, or Teri Rowles at Fisheries, you could trust Darlene Ketten to restore order to the chaos of a mass stranding on foreign shores.
• • •
Balcomb spotted Ketten chatting up a white-uniformed Bahamian customs officer. He poked around inside her dissection kit, laughed at something she said, and waved her through. She was traveling light—her dissection kit on one shoulder and an overnight bag on the other—and was dressed in a linen pantsuit set off by a brightly colored silk scarf.
Balcomb waved at Ketten, and she waved back. “I told you I’ d get down here, as soon as you found me some volunteers,” she said. Balcomb smiled. She did remember their last meeting.
On the cab ride to Bater’s office, Balcomb briefed her on the strandings and the possible specimens that remained scattered across the islands. Very gently, he probed her about any details she might have heard from her Navy contacts about exercises in the Bahamas.
“I’ve heard that ONR has been testing sonobuoys northeast of Abaco,” she told him, echoing what he’ d heard from Gisiner. “But that’s been dismissed from the equation. Everyone knows,” she said, meaning everyone who knew anything about sound in the ocean, “those transmissions couldn’t have been a factor. Not with a twenty-mile landmass between the source and the strandings. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what we can learn from the heads you’ve collected. Just as soon as we’re done here in Freeport.”
Balcomb kept the conversation light and local. The weather, culinary treats. He was enjoying the collegiality she’ d extended him, and he didn’t want to cast aspersions on her naval patrons—so he didn’t mention the destroyer. And he didn’t talk about the underwater microphone arrays at AUTEC.
• • •
Two Cuvier’s whale heads that Alan Bater had retrieved from Gold Rock Creek were arranged across an examining table in his veterinary office. By the time Balcomb and Ketten arrived, the aroma in the cramped examining room had become pungent to the point of embarrassment. When he saw Ketten enter, Bater broke off wrestling with a window that was reluctant to open and rushed to introduce himself.
“Welcome to my clinic, Dr. Ketten.”
“Please, call me Darlene.”
“It’s an honor to have you here, Dr.—er, Darlene. A privilege.”
Balcomb had met Bater once before at a benefit even
t in Freeport that Diane had urged him to attend. He recognized Bater now by his tanned, bald head, trim white beard, and less than trim figure. A Brit transplant who’ d fled cold, damp England for the warm embrace of the island life and all its consumable pleasures, Bater was known in Freeport as a bon vivant and ardent rugby player, until his love of food sidelined him from active play. He was somewhat less well known as a captive-dolphin doctor who—as Bater took pleasure in informing new acquaintances—had consulted on The Day of the Dolphin when it was filmed on Treasure Cay in the early 1970s.
Wedged into the corner of the examining room were Ruth Ewing, a Fisheries veterinarian who had flown in from the Miami office, and Charlie Potter, Jim Mead’s research partner from the Smithsonian in Washington. There wasn’t room to maneuver around for handshakes, so Ketten and Balcomb made do with head nods of welcome.
Ketten pulled on a pair of latex gloves with two crisp snaps. She leaned in close to the heads and prodded them with her thumb and forefinger. To judge from the expression on Ketten’s face, she’ d hoped for fresher goods.
“Is there a CT scanner available here, or somewhere else on the island?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not,” said Bater. “My practice is mostly cats and dogs. Occasionally a horse, though equines are not my specialty. And, of course, dolphins, though I tend to treat them on-site. Unless they required intravenous antibiotics, in which case—”
Ketten broke in, “What about the local hospital?”
“That would be Rand Memorial, and no, I’m afraid they don’t have a CT scanner either. The closest would be in Nassau, but, of course, that’s a plane flight away, and we might need permission from Bahamian Fisheries to transport these specimens.”
Darlene took a scalpel from her kit and made an incision below the jaw-line of one of the whales, revealing a layer of acoustic fat that was black with putrefaction. When she resected the other jawbone, a stream of dark green goo oozed onto the floor. “These won’t do,” she said sternly. “I’ll take the ear bones, but there’s nothing else I can use, inside or outside the braincase, CT or no CT. Not in this state of decomposition.”
Bater was crestfallen, and a bit embarrassed. “I have a blood sample . . . from the eyes.”
“How long was it exposed to air?”
“Twelve, perhaps sixteen hours. Not more than eighteen, certainly.”
Ketten let his reply hang in the air, allowing her audience to visualize the effect of 18 hours of oxidation on a blood specimen. Balcomb almost felt sorry for Bater.
“Are there any fresher heads on this island?” Ketten asked, looking around the room.
“There’s a minke whale at High Rock that I’ve arranged for you to examine,” said Bater. “From what I’ve heard, it’s been well protected from the elements. Other than sharks, which I gather had a rather good go at the bugger before it died. Is a shark an ‘element,’ properly speaking? I wonder.”
Ketten turned to Balcomb. “When can I see your heads?”
“Whenever you like. We can fly over this afternoon.”
“His heads are in a freezer. They’ll keep,” Bater protested. “The minke is the highest priority! I really must insist.”
Ketten sighed. Balcomb could imagine the condition of the minke by now. He was already restless to return to Abaco. “I need to get back to my team,” he said to Ketten. “I’ll keep the heads on ice till you get there.”
“Until then,” she agreed. She peeled off her gloves and dropped first one, and then the other, into the waste pail.
• • •
An hour after fleeing Bater’s office, Balcomb tracked down his pilot friend in a sport fishing store downtown. They were aloft and headed home by mid-afternoon.
As their plane began to descend toward Marsh Harbour Airport, it flew directly over two US Navy guided-missile frigates that were steaming down the center of Northwest Providence Channel. It’s hard to hide modern warships the size of American frigates, but it seemed to Balcomb that the Navy wasn’t even trying.
He returned to Sandy Point to find Diane and the Earthlings clustered around a TV that someone had set up in the living room. A Miami news station was reporting on the strandings from Grand Bahama. Ken could see the reporter interviewing Bater, posed proudly beside the stranded minke whale at High Rock, while local schoolkids mugged for the camera behind him.
Ken hadn’t eaten all day, and he was suddenly very hungry. He rummaged through the refrigerator and found a sandwich that he ate standing in front of the sink. Sometimes it felt as though he’ d eaten most of his meals standing up—in ship galleys, on the deck of his house in the San Juans, in sonar stations in the middle of the Pacific.
When Diane joined him in the kitchen, he tried to read her body language as she stood with her arms crossed, leaning back on the kitchen counter. Was she sore that he’ d left her behind to babysit the Earthlings?
“Have you been out on the water to have a look around?” he ventured.
“I’ve been chained to the phone, fielding calls.” She picked up a sheaf of handwritten notes and held them out to him. There were reports by local fishermen of naval craft in the channel, and calls from reporters who wanted comments or interviews. National Public Radio, an Associated Press correspondent, someone from the Dallas Morning News. “I told them they should talk to you.”
Ken couldn’t tell whether she was deferring to his seniority or if she was simply wary of being quoted in print. Now that the US Navy was surfacing in the stranding narrative, Ken felt doubly damned in Diane’s eyes—as an American and as a Navy veteran. He understood why she resented the way the Americans pushed around the Bahamian government. It made no sense that the US Navy had a 60-year lease on the AUTEC testing range that dominated Andros, the biggest island in the Bahamas. Diane’s cousin in the Interior Ministry had told them how the US Navy typically secured the Bahamians’ “consent” to conduct exercises in their waters. A day or two in advance, a midstaff lieutenant or civilian contractor would phone the ministry and inform it of the exercises, perhaps suggesting that it post a mariners’ notice or have a Bahamian patrol boat handy to keep the fishermen and cruise ships outside the perimeter. Sometimes they’ d warn the Bahamians if live fire exercises would be involved. Sometimes not.
Ken never defended the Navy to her. But Diane didn’t seem to understand that back when he was serving, there was a war going on. It may have been a Cold War where weapons were rarely fired, but the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Civilians never saw the deadly serious game of blindman’s bluff going on between Soviet and American submarines, and Ken never spoke about it. No one did. Whether or not anyone even remembered, Americans had relied on their Navy to track every Soviet submarine armed with nuclear missiles, day and night, for 30 years.
He was proud of his seven years of silent service to that mission. What did Diane, with her boarding schools and her summers sailing catamarans around the islands, know about the dead-cold sweat of a Delta-class boomer leaking through the net, loaded with enough kilotons to take out Los Angeles and San Francisco?
He shoved the mayonnaise in the refrigerator and shut the door harder than he had to. As usual, his internal monologue and curt gesture were the closest he came to speaking his mind. Then he retreated to the office.
• • •
Balcomb logged on to MARMAM and found that his posting had generated considerable commentary from opinionated parties near and far. Most of it was uninformed speculation, hearsay reports of seismic activity, mariners’ warnings pulled from elsewhere on the web, some talk of British navy ships sighted off Eleuthera, to the south.
Scrolling through the chatter, Balcomb found a posting by a well-known Greek correspondent:
Posted by: Dr. Alexandros Frantzis
Subject: Re: Atypical mass strandings and naval exercises
Dear all,
Unfortunately, we didn’t have to wait very long since 1996 (when NATO low-frequency sonar exercises and beaked whale
s mass stranding occurred in Greece). Some people will say it is too early to speak about possible causes for the Bahamas mass stranding. Perhaps they are scientifically right and certainly, we will all wait for the results of the good specialists who went to Bahamas to collect samples and data. Nevertheless, since the news seems to confirm that the US Navy was there at the right time and the right place performing “submarine detection,” the Bahamas case seems like another sonar-related stranding. Unfortunately, all this is very difficult to prove scientifically. And we cannot interview the stranded animals asking them “why are you here?”
Let’s hope that this atypical mass stranding will be the last and we will not need other strandings to convince the world navies that their games are very dangerous.
Best wishes, Alexandros
Dr. Alexandros Frantzis, Institute of Marine Biological Resources, National Centre for Marine Research, Hellenikon, Greece
Balcomb’s email in-box was crammed with interview requests from journalists. He leafed through the phone messages Diane had given him, pulled the first Post-it note off the top of the pile, and dialed the number.
11
Depth Charges
DAY 6: MARCH 20, 2000
Los Angeles Office of NRDC
Joel Reynolds was pleased to find Michael Jasny’s draft letter to the Navy Secretary waiting on his desk Monday morning. As usual, Jasny’s research was exhaustive.
As the scientific R&D arm of the Navy, the Office of Naval Research was constantly testing new weapons systems, including sonar. Jasny’s list of ONR’s newest acoustic and nonacoustic weaponry read like science fiction. Reynolds had no idea what the Channel Probe Pulse Program, geoacoustic inversion, or Multipulse Airgun System were. Neither did Jasny—although Reynolds was confident that by week’s end he would. One of the tests—the Directional Command Activated Sonobuoy System—involved floating active-sonar transmitters called sonobuoys that were dropped from aircraft to acoustically search a quadrant of ocean.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 13