War of the Whales (19 page)

As he waited outside her arrival gate, Balcomb wondered whether she’ d remember their meeting four years ago. He decided not to bring it up unless she did.

•  •  •

Darlene Ketten was accustomed to being on call. Rather like a country doctor, she thought, who answered the night bell whenever a child decided to arrive into the world or, on the other end of the life cycle, when the family of a recently deceased patient required certification of cause of death.

Ten weeks before the Bahamas stranding, Ketten had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a party in Hyannis, on Cape Cod. The partygoers were joking nervously about Y2K, laying wagers on whether or not their computers would reboot the first morning of the new millennium. Two hours before midnight, she got a cell phone call reporting a stranding on Nantucket Island. Darlene enjoyed a good party as much as the next person, but the minute she heard that a dead sperm whale had stranded on Surfside Beach, she put down her champagne glass, borrowed a hammer and chisel from her host, and bolted for the airport. Everything else she needed—including knives, specimen jars, formalin and foil, flashlights and energy bars—was stowed in the dissection kit she always carried in the trunk of her car.

Darlene was three years and six ear bones into her study of sperm whale hearing. Three years of impatiently waiting for the next “volunteer” to wash ashore. If she delayed investigating this stranding until first light, the tide would roll back in, and she’ d find herself working in three feet of surf. Worse, some human or animal scavenger might get there ahead of her and contaminate the evidence trail. An unthinkable outcome.

By two in the morning, the high school students who had discovered the whale during an impromptu New Year’s Eve beach party had long since departed Surfside. Had they lingered, they would have witnessed a remarkable moonlit tableau: a 50-foot-long sperm whale lay on its side in the sand, the surf knocking against its tail—while at the other end of its massive expanse, a petite, 40-year-old woman in a black velvet minidress and down parka seemed to be disappearing into the side of the whale’s head. The light of a nearby Coleman lantern glinted off the blade of her flensing knife as it tunneled deeper into blubber and tissue.

Ketten had been hard at work for more than an hour. Her feet were wet and cold, her hands numb beneath thin latex gloves. It was all she could do to keep from gagging from the rank plume of steam that poured out of the head cavity, where 98-degree tissue met the frigid night air.

She was in heaven.

Inch by inch, moment by moment, she drew closer to her prize: the tympano-periotic bulla—the ear bone that houses the exquisite, intricate labyrinth of the sperm whale’s inner ear.

When Ketten reached the bony structures guarding the bulla, she switched from flensing knife to hammer and chisel. Then, when she finally exposed the ligaments behind the bulla, she used a handsaw to cut it loose. Slowly, she lifted the bulla out of the whale’s head and cradled it in her hands. Though the ear bones are the smallest bones in any mammal’s body, a whale’s bulla—particularly in low-frequency baleen whales—can be as large as a grapefruit and heavier than rock. After examining its contours by lantern light, Ketten injected formalin through a crevice in the bony vault to preserve the cochlear structures that were locked inside.

By dawn, Ketten had extracted the other ear bone and had driven back to the airport in time for the early-morning flight to Boston, her treasures tucked safely inside her carry-on bag. By lunchtime, the ear bones would be nestled together on the bed of her CT scanner back at Harvard, ready to give up all their hidden secrets.

In the weeks that followed her Nantucket scavenger hunt, Ketten logged thousands of air miles in pursuit of other specimens stranded on distant shores. When Bob Gisiner tracked her down the day after the Bahamas strandings, she was consulting with colleagues at the Navy’s marine mammal research station in Point Loma, California, and preparing to guest-lecture at Scripps in La Jolla. She couldn’t cancel her lecture, but she skipped the reception afterward and caught the red-eye to Miami.

•  •  •

No one could ever accuse Balcomb of being a groupie. But over the past decade, he had followed Ketten’s publications closely. She was the first researcher to study the internal structures of beaked whale phonation and hearing, and the first to trace the path of sound waves all the way from their source in the ocean to the beaked whale’s auditory cortex.

There were a few guys, like Jim Mead at the Smithsonian, who knew as much or more than Balcomb about beaked whale evolution, based on the fossil and bone records. But Ketten was fluent in the esoteric language Balcomb had learned in the Navy: marine acoustics. Now that she had finally found her way to the Bahamas, Balcomb was excited at the prospect of an on-site tutorial from the world’s leading expert in beaked whale hearing.

Like Balcomb’s own career path, and those of so many of his cetologist colleagues, Ketten’s arrival at the apex of her arcane subspecialty had been accidental. “Serendipitous” was the adjective she preferred. She hadn’t started out wanting to be a whale coroner. Like most young whale researchers, she’ d planned to study live cetaceans. When she graduated from MIT in 1980 with a master’s degree in biological oceanography, she wanted to investigate how dolphins used their vocalizations to communicate compared with how they echolocated with sound while hunting.

She applied to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine—not to become a physician but because the medical school’s behavioral ecology department had a research affiliation with Baltimore’s National Aquarium. The aquarium’s half dozen dolphins doubled as stars of the twice-daily dolphin show and as research subjects. When the dolphin tank became contaminated the summer before her first semester, the dolphins were loaned to another aquarium for the next two years during renovations to their Baltimore home. So Ketten arrived at Hopkins without a research project.

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.”