3D reconstruction from CT scans of a whole Short-beaked Common Dolphin (Delphinus delphis) showing the animal’s external surface and below, with a transparent skin, the skeletal anatomy.
By three in the morning, they had completed their work, and Carl had packed all the specimens into the lab’s freezer. Ketten was still dictating her findings. “The patterning of the hemorrhages therefore suggests strongly that a cerebrospinal fluid ‘squeeze’ from an intense pressure event was the source of inner ear blood in these animals . . . The inner ear pathologies demonstrated on the scans are consistent with observed pathology in ears exposed to exceptionally intense impulsive sources . . . The pattern of damage is consistent with acoustic trauma, but a number of other causes are equally possible and cannot be ruled out at this stage of analysis.”
Just before dawn, the four of them drove the specimens down to Woods Hole, two hours south of Boston. They were giddy with exhaustion by the time they reached the Redfield Laboratory on Water Street. When they’ d moved the specimens inside the walk-in freezer, Ketten closed the freezer door and sealed it with a padlock. Final chain-of-custody papers were signed all around. “And we’re done,” said Ketten, sealing the documents into a large envelope. With a mock ceremonial bow, she presented Balcomb with another envelope containing a full set of CT scans. She told them she’ d be in touch as soon as they had a date scheduled for the full physical necropsy.
Balcomb would have liked to linger in Woods Hole and tour the facilities. But they had a noon flight back to Miami, and Ketten had a class to teach in an hour. They said their good-byes on the steps of the lab, and Carl drove them back to Logan Airport.
Before her class began, Ketten called Bob Gisiner to report her preliminary findings. She confirmed that the heads were now in secure custody at her Woods Hole lab, and that Balcomb and Claridge would soon be on a plane back to the Bahamas.
SANDY POINT, ABACO ISLAND, THE BAHAMAS
A week after his return to Abaco, Balcomb couldn’t stop thinking about the heads back in Woods Hole. He’ d tried calling Ketten to find out the date of the necropsy, but he couldn’t catch her in. And she didn’t call him back. Gisiner wasn’t taking or returning his calls either. The only person he could reach was Gentry, who was sounding more and more like an assigned handler, counseling patience and team play and trust that things would come out right in the end.
Without the whales to survey, Balcomb and Claridge were at loose ends. Each of their daily trips to the canyon in search of beaked whales had ended in disappointment.
Sitting on the back porch at the end of another restless, purposeless day, Balcomb gazed out across the canyon in the direction of the AUTEC testing range. He wondered what sounds the Navy hydrophones mounted on the sea floor had recorded the night of the stranding. He was haunted by a memory from his final Navy tour in Japan. His wife at the time, Camille, was researching the 400-year-old dolphin fishery at the small coastal town of Taiji. Though it was normally closed to Westerners, he and Camille had arranged to witness the seasonal dolphin drive hunt.
A flotilla of a dozen small boats arranged itself into a straight line just outside the mouth of the cove. A short time later, a large pod of dolphins approached, and the line of boats opened out to herd them inside the cove. Then the boats closed formation, sealing the mouth of the cove. Each boatman lowered a steel pipe halfway into the water and began banging the top half with a second steel pipe. From the shore, Ken and Camille could hear the steel pipes clanging loudly in unison. Balcomb knew that underneath the water’s surface, the sound was converging into a wall of high-decibel noise. Then the boats began to move toward the shore, driving the dolphins ahead of them and into the shallows.
Ken and Camille watched in horror as the men leapt from their boats into the churning waters. They culled a few young females for export to foreign marine parks. They stabbed the remaining dolphins with spears, dragged their thrashing bodies onto the beach, and slit their throats. The men didn’t wait for the dolphins to die before butchering them into steaks bound for fish markets across Japan. The shallows turned dark red with blood, and the air filled with the shrieks of dozens of dying dolphins.
Twenty-five years later, standing on another beach a world away from Taiji, Balcomb could still hear the knell of the steel pipes, could still see the panicked dolphins fleeing ahead of the acoustic storm, rushing toward the oblivion of the beach.
PART THREE
THE RELUCTANT WHISTLE-BLOWER
What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? . . . Suppose if God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’ d figured it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?”
—Cormac McCarthy, Of Whales and Men
17
A Mind in the Water
When the Navy began studying cetacean biosonar in the late 1940s, the only people who cared about saving the whales were whalers.
By the end of World War II, it had become clear to everyone in the whaling industry that 50 years of unbridled slaughter had decimated populations around the world. Many commercial species were already depleted and threatened with extinction. Two late-nineteenth-century inventions by the Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn had reduced even the most gigantic whales to helpless prey. In 1863 he introduced the first steam-powered whaling ship that could overtake even the largest and fastest of the great whales: blues, fins, and seis that could outswim any ship under sail. A few years later, he demonstrated how his deck-mounted harpoon canon, firing explosive grenades, could stop the heart of a 100-foot-long leviathan.
Things got progressively worse for whales in the twentieth century. Demand for whale oil to manufacture glycerin bombs spiked during World War I, and after the war, the process of hydrogenating whale oil created a boom market for its use in margarine. By the 1920s, fleets of floating factory ships were killing and processing whales at sea with lethal efficiency. Throughout the 1930s, tens of thousands of great whales were harvested each year. In 1939 alone, whalers killed almost 40,000 blue whales.
Whaling was suspended during World War II, as shipping lanes shut down and many whaling ships were drafted into service as military cargo vessels. Still, the war took a deadly toll on whales caught in the cross fire of major sea battles in the Atlantic and Pacific. Millions of tons of explosives were detonated in the oceans, including hundreds of thousands of antisubmarine depth charges. Air forces and navies on both sides of the conflict made a practice of using passing pods for target practice. In the aftermath of the war, industrious whalers adapted military sonar to locate, drive to the surface, and herd their prey—but there were indisputably far fewer whales left to hunt.1
In 1946, 15 whaling nations established the International Whaling Commission with the stated goal “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.” The idea of preserving whale populations for purposes other than killing and processing them into margarine and motor oil was still 20 years in the future. And it would be fully 40 years before the International Whaling Commission called a halt to commercial whaling worldwide in 1986.
During those intervening four decades, whales would undergo a radical cultural transformation from commercial commodity to entertainment superstars and revered icons of the New Age, environmental, and animal rights movements. Where once their value was measured in the price per barrel of their oil, whales and dolphins would suddenly become box-office sensations, drawing millions of admiring customers to movie theaters, aquariums, and theme parks, and, in time, to open-sea whale-watching venues around the world.
One of the unlikely catalysts of this cultural sea change was the cadre of scientific researchers—almost all of them funded by the US Navy—who first studied and appreciated whales as more than mere casks of oil. Som
e of these early investigators were so transfigured by their close encounters with whales and dolphins that they abandoned their research careers to become public advocates for whale conservation, and even liberation.
• • •
The impetus for the Navy’s decades-long investment in whale research was a bat-obsessed biology student named Donald Griffin. In 1940, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Griffin conceived an experiment to solve a 200-year-old zoology puzzle known as “Spallanzani’s bat problem.” Lazzaro Spallanzani had been an eighteenth-century Italian naturalist who hypothesized, after alternately blinding and deafening bats, that they navigated in the dark using sound rather than sight. But because bats transmitted their high-frequency sound signals above the human hearing threshold, they appeared to be flying in silence. This conundrum left Spallanzani unable to explain precisely how bats navigate in pitch-black caves.
When Griffin learned that Harvard’s physics department had recently invented an ultrasonic sound detector, he hoped this new technology might be the key to unlocking Spallanzani’s “problem.” He constructed an elaborate maze of hanging wires in a blacked-out basement laboratory, which he then equipped with ultrasonic sound receivers. The bats successfully navigated the maze in total darkness, and the ultrasonic receivers enabled Griffin to record the squeaky clicks of their ultrahigh-frequency sound emissions. He deduced correctly that the bats were navigating by the echoes from their clicks, a method that he named “echolocation.” Griffin later demonstrated that bats also employed echolocation to hunt in the dark, using different frequency transmissions depending on the size of the insects they were hunting.
The Navy, always on the lookout for ways to improve its radar and sonar capabilities, immediately took an interest in Griffin’s findings. After ONR began supporting his research into animal behavior, Griffin speculated that mammals other than bats might navigate by echolocation—notably, whales in the lightless ocean depths.2 This provocative supposition encouraged the Navy—in service to its antisubmarine warfare mission—to embark on a decades-long effort to confirm, describe, decode, and deploy cetacean biosonar.
There was nothing novel about the idea of recruiting animals into warfare. Elephants, camels, and horses had conveyed soldiers, supplies, and arms into battles for centuries. Soldiers had long trained dogs to attack enemies, sniff out bombs, guard facilities, and, in the case of the Soviet army in World War II, to run under enemy tanks with explosives strapped to their backs. During the same war, the British Air Ministry Pigeon Section deployed a quarter million homing pigeons as military messengers—32 of which were awarded the Dickin Medal “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to service.” Not to be outdone by its ally across the Atlantic, the US military developed the Bat Bomb Project, which hoped to use bats as flying incendiary devices for the firebombing of Tokyo.3
But Griffin’s discovery of animal echolocation transformed the quest to harness an animal’s unique sensory talents for military advantage. Instead of merely training animals to fight, Griffin inspired naval engineers to renew a centuries-old tradition of looking to biology for design inspiration. Leonardo da Vinci modeled ship hulls on the fish and marine mammals he illustrated. The Wright Brothers adopted a fixed-wing design for their first airplane after observing that large birds glided with almost no wing movement. In the 1950s, engineers called animal-inspired technology biomimetics and biomimicry, derived from the Greek bios, for “life,” and mimesis, for “imitation.” However, it was the term “bionics,” the compound of “biology” and “electronics,” that the Navy adopted to describe its research and development of technology that could rival the biosonar talents of a dolphin.
• • •
Before the US Navy became the leading patron of modern cetology, whale science had relied primarily on whalers’ observations of the behavior of their prey. The only research expeditions of any note had been the Discovery Investigations in the 1920s and 1930s led by British scientists who culled anatomical specimens from the decks of whaling ships working the waters near Antarctica.
The Navy chose a tamer setting to test Griffin’s hypothesis of cetacean biosonar. Marine Studios, originally built in the 1930s as a film set for underwater movies, was stocked with dolphins, seals, and sharks captured from the waters near St. Augustine, Florida. After closing during the war, it reopened as Marineland, the nation’s first marine park.
Marineland’s live shows starring trained dolphins gave tens of thousands of visitors their first close-up view of small whales. Just a decade earlier, dolphins had been despised by fishermen who derided them as “pig fish” and “herring hogs” for poaching fish from their nets. But with the rising celebrity of Flippy, Splash, and Zippy—whose balletic performances were broadcast live on CBS-TV’s Marineland Carnival—dolphins began a long run as America’s marine mammal sweethearts.
A marine park turned out to be a good laboratory for conducting dolphin research. Man-made tanks bore little resemblance to a dolphin’s natural habitat, but compared to the dark oceans, they offered early investigators a transparent and controlled research environment. Dolphins, highly social and responsive to training, could provide direct feedback to stimuli much the way that a human subject could, pressing levers in response to commands and even vocalizing. Navy-funded studies at Marineland marked cetology’s transition from a “dead science,” based on examination of scavenged remains from beaches and whaling stations, to a “life science” of controlled experimentation and observation, first in captive settings and later in the wild.
The young biologist-psychologist who served as the curator of Marineland, Arthur McBride, became fascinated by the extraordinary range of sounds emerging from the dolphin tanks. Aristotle had recorded his observations of dolphin vocalizations thousands of years earlier in his Historia Animalium, but McBride was the first scientist to remark on the biosonar possibilities of their barks, grunts, clicks, whistles, moans, and distinctive “creaking door” sound. Having heard from local fishermen about the dolphins’ ability to evade their nets in Florida’s opaque St. John’s River, McBride noted in his journals that “this behavior calls to mind the sonic sending and receiving apparatus which enables the bat to avoid obstacles in the dark.” In 1947, with the aid of “a supersonic sending and receiving apparatus” provided by the newly formed Office of Naval Research, McBride began to measure dolphin responses to ultrasonic frequencies.
In 1951 ONR dispatched William Schevill and his research partner and wife, Barbara Lawrence, from Woods Hole to Marineland to test Griffin’s and McBride’s hypothesis of dolphin echolocation. After recording the full range of dolphin vocalizations and verifying the acuity of their hearing, Schevill and Lawrence transported one of the animals back to Woods Hole for further tests. Working at night in a pond, they confirmed the dolphins’ ability to navigate around nets in the dark, muddy water.
At the same time, ONR was funding research by Winthrop Kellogg, a psychologist at Florida State University. With the assistance of then undergraduate marine biologist Sylvia Earle, Kellogg established that dolphins consistently swam around a transparent Plexiglas wall, even in darkness. By 1953, Kellogg and the Schevills had independently published research demonstrating that the dolphins’ “rusty-hinge” vocalization was actually a series of rapid clicks with a wideband frequency spectrum that they used to navigate, hunt, and communicate.
Finally, Ken Norris, a World War II Navy veteran and curator of Marineland’s newly opened sister park, Marineland of the Pacific, in Southern California, conclusively proved dolphin echolocation. Norris, who would later mentor Balcomb, Gisiner, and Gentry at UC Santa Cruz, outfitted a bottlenose dolphin named Zippy with suction cup blindfolds to demonstrate that he could navigate a maze of pipes suspended in a tank. Zippy accurately echolocated objects at a distance of 30 feet. Later research revealed that dolphin biosonar far outmatched the Navy’s active sonar technology in every dimension. Dolphins could detect a target the size of a tangerine from 300 feet a
way, and could distinguish between an aluminum and an iron plate, a hollow tube and a solid one, and ball bearings of microscopically different sizes. Dolphins could discriminate 5,000 individual clicks per seconds, compared to a human’s ability to detect 30 per second.
Kellogg expressed the consensus view of his research colleagues when he reported to ONR, “What these animals can do has a definite bearing on our national defense, as a means of improving man-made sonar.”
• • •
The improbable ascent of whales from raw material for dog food to cultural icons and prized naval assets was propelled, as much as anyone, by an eccentric neuroscientist who tirelessly promoted his passion for small whales and their big brains. John Lilly was the progenitor of two parallel and, eventually, intersecting crusades: the Navy’s drive to decode cetacean communication and the conservation community’s campaign to save the whales.4
In many ways, Lilly’s career mirrored Walter Munk’s. They were both fugitives from successful banking families—Lilly hailed from Saint Paul, Minnesota; Munk from Vienna. Like Munk, Lilly ran away to California and ended up at the California Institute of Technology, where he immersed himself in physics, biology, and human physiology. Coincidentally, their paths crossed during their senior years, when Lilly and Munk were co-presidents of the CalTech ski club that Munk had founded the year before. When Munk moved on to graduate school at Scripps, Lilly went east to medical school at Dartmouth College, where he studied brain physiology and began inventing medical instruments. During the war, the US Army Air Forces recruited Lilly to study problems of high-altitude flight at its aeromedical lab in Columbus, Ohio. By the war’s end, Lilly had migrated to the top of the “preferred list” of scientists compiled by the War Manpower Commission.
War of the Whales: A True Story Page 23