War of the Whales (51 page)

Within a few minutes, the three-way cetacean conversation was overwhelmed by pulses of loud, shrieking noise. Balcomb immediately recognized the sound as sonar—probably midfrequency, to judge by the whining pitch of the “pings.” He scanned the horizon with the big-eye binoculars mounted on his deck and soon locked in on the outline of a battleship 12 miles offshore in Haro Strait, the narrow channel separating San Juan Island from the Canadian mainland. It was too far away for him to tell whether it belonged to the Canadians or to the US Navy.

Back in the cove, J Pod grouped tightly together and hovered close to shore. Clearly agitated, they milled in circles, first in one direction and then the other. In decades of observing killer whales in the cove, Balcomb had never witnessed this kind of panicked behavior. As the battleship drew closer to the mouth of the cove, the intensity of the sonar noise increased, along with the animals’ distress. The minke whale took off like a shot toward the far end of the cove. The harbor porpoise zoomed across the surface in the same direction. The mouth of the cove was 20 miles wide, but the pod of killer whales seemed to be trapped inside. They broke into two groups and began slapping their tails against the surface.

May 5th, 2003: Smuggler’s Cove, San Juan Island, Washington. Ken Balcomb photographs and videotapes the guided-missile destroyer
USS Shoup
as it conducts a sonar sweep of Haro Strait. Foreground: whale-watching vessels and the orcas of J Pod.

When the warship approached to within three miles of shore, Balcomb could make out the markings on its side. It was a guided-missile destroyer, the USS
Shoup
. Balcomb called the US Coast Guard and the regional Fisheries office and told them they needed to get hold of the
Shoup
’s commander and tell him to shut off its sonar. Twenty minutes later, the sonar storm subsided.

Balcomb called a Seattle TV station, KOMO 4 TV, which dispatched a helicopter news crew to the scene. When it contacted the Navy for a response to the incident, a spokesman denied that any Navy vessels were operating in the strait. That evening, KOMO 4 broadcast Balcomb’s video of the
Shoup
in Haro Strait and the audio of its piercing sonar.
^*
In the foreground, the killer whales looked tormented, and many of the whale watchers nearby were hysterical. Interviewed for the evening news, they described the terrifying din of the sonar, which was audible in the air
above
the water.

By the next morning, the Navy amended its statement. For five hours the previous day, the
Shoup
had conducted minesweeping exercises in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Haro Strait while transmitting 235 decibels of midfrequency sonar. The sound Balcomb recorded on tape was the
Shoup
’s SQS-53C sonar. The
Shoup
’s Destroyer Squadron 9, operating out of the naval station in Everett, Washington, often conducted maneuvers in Puget Sound. But after the Bahamas stranding and the interim report, Balcomb assumed that the Navy knew better than to conduct sonar exercises in a narrow channel. Especially inside Haro Strait, which was world famous as a whale-watching destination. Apparently, the
Shoup
’s commander didn’t get the memo.

The day after the incident, dead harbor porpoises began floating ashore. Ten landed on the US coastline, and six stranded on the Canadian side of the border. When a freshly dead harbor porpoise drifted into nearby False Bay with blood leaking from its eye, Balcomb wrapped the animal in plastic and stowed it in the six-foot freezer chest in his basement.

Balcomb’s video of the
Shoup
incident quickly went viral on the internet. Whale watchers were used to seeing wild orcas knifing majestically through the water, not cowering in the shadow of a US destroyer. Most people had never heard the sound of military sonar, and they were horrified to see a US Navy destroyer bearing down on a pod of terrified whales.

The ensuing uproar over the strandings and the videotape forced Fisheries to launch an investigation. Soon six porpoises lay in a freezer at the regional Fisheries headquarters. Fisheries wanted to CT scan the animals before necropsy but said it couldn’t reserve time on a local CT scanner for two months. Balcomb found a private clinic that offered to scan his harbor porpoise as soon as he could bring it over. The scans, which he copied before turning them over to Fisheries along with the frozen porpoise, showed the same signs of acoustic trauma and hemorrhaging around the brain that he’ d seen in the scans of the Bahamas specimens.

Fisheries put Darlene Ketten in charge of its forensic investigation and barred Balcomb from the necropsies, even though he had contributed one of the specimens. He showed up at Fisheries the day of the necropsies anyway and was blocked from entering by two guards. So he stood in the press gallery and observed the proceedings through a telephoto lens.

In October the Navy’s Pacific Fleet published a report exonerating itself of culpability in the Haro Strait stranding. A panel of experts from the Navy’s Marine Mammal Training Program, led by Sam Ridgway, had reviewed Balcomb’s videotape of the incident and suggested—in defiance of the videos’ alarming visual and audio evidence to the contrary—that the whale-watching boats were more likely to have distressed the killer whales than the
Shoup
’s sonar transmissions. The Navy report concluded: “The
Shoup
operated its sonar on 5 May 2003 in a manner consistent with established guidelines and procedures.”
²

Months later, Fisheries released its report on the stranding incident, citing “inconclusive evidence of causation,” due in part to the “advanced stage of decomposition” of the specimens.
³
According to a local colleague of Balcomb’s who participated in the necropsies, the Fisheries freezer had been set to “auto-defrost” mode, so the specimens had been continuously thawing and refreezing during the two months between the stranding and the necropsies. The reports by the Navy and Fisheries were widely perceived as flying in the face of reality—and of the most damning documentation ever preserved on videotape of whales caught in the cross fire from a sonar training exercise.

•  •  •

Sonar wasn’t the only man-made threat to the Southern Resident Community of orcas. Two decades after the wild capture spree of the sixties and seventies, the killer whales had rebounded to a healthy and stable population of about 100. Then, in the nineties, the community went into steep decline. With their wild salmon prey dying off from dammed rivers and overforested streambeds, orcas were forced to feed on contaminated bottom fish. Fecal samples from killer whales revealed the highest concentrations of toxins, including PCBs and the banned insecticide DDT, found in any animals ever tested. By the turn of the century, the Southern Resident Community had declined to fewer than 80 whales.

In 2002 Balcomb reported the alarming population drop-off to the government review committee of biologists that met each year to assess the threatened and endangered status of animals under the Endangered Species Act. But it wasn’t until Balcomb filed declarations on behalf of a 2003 lawsuit by the conservation group Earthjustice that Fisheries finally agreed to designate the Southern Resident Community as “threatened.” A year later, based partly on Balcomb’s updated census data, Fisheries moved the local orcas onto its “endangered” list—the first and only killer-whale community to achieve that designation. Once listed as endangered, the orcas won a host of protections. Fisheries was required by the federal Endangered Species Act to designate a protected habitat and to closely monitor the community’s health and population size.

Those protections were long overdue, in Balcomb’s view. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that three decades of self-funded summer surveys had finally benefited the whales. In 2005, 30 years after his first and only Fisheries-funded census in 1976, Balcomb and his Center for Whale Research was awarded a five-year Fisheries contract to survey the Southern Resident Community.

•  •  •

With so much public attention focused on whale strandings in the presence of naval sonar, the Office of Naval Research was under pressure to fund basic behavioral research—particularly the little-understood diving behavior of beaked whales. The interim report on the Bahamas stranding included a list of research initiatives proposed by Bob Gisiner, most of them focused on beaked whales in the Bahamas. Beginning in 2003, Gisiner funded Chris Clark and Peter Tyack to lead a series of tagging expeditions in the Bahamas to chart the diving and noise-response patterns of beaked whales.

The shotgun-delivered steel darts of Balcomb’s early tagging expeditions had been replaced by high-tech electronic sensors designed by Mark Johnson, an engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic. The challenge lay in attaching those sensors via suction cups to skittish beaked whales when they briefly surfaced for air. Clark and Tyack needed a local beaked whale expert to help them locate and tag the elusive creatures who lived near the AUTEC range, 100 miles southwest of Abaco. They approached Diane Claridge for help and offered her co-author credit on any resulting publications. She accepted.

Infused with new funding and with forthcoming publication credits, Claridge launched the newly named Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation in collaboration with her new research partner, Charlotte Dunn.

•  •  •

In 2004 Balcomb was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He’ d gone without health insurance ever since leaving the Navy in 1975, and he had no savings. His doctor estimated the out-of-pocket expense of the recommended radiation treatment at $42,000. Balcomb wasn’t about to sell his house and boats to pay for the treatment. They were his bequest to the Center for Whale Research. His only other assets were the antique cars stashed in sheds around the property. Even if he could sell them for enough cash, he couldn’t see spending that kind of money on himself. One of his wives had called him penny
and
pound foolish, and he supposed she was right. But it just didn’t seem worth the expense.

When word got out about his diagnosis, two donors to the Center for Whale Research offered to help. A Seattle-based radiologist, whom Balcomb had previously persuaded to conduct CT scans of stranded whales, offered Balcomb free radiation treatment for his cancer. Another sponsor donated the use of his small plane to ferry Balcomb back and forth to the mainland. Balcomb agreed, but only on condition that he could pilot the plane himself.

The accumulation of evidence from Haro Strait and the other mass strandings around the world increasingly pointed to
midfrequency
sonar as the culprit. But Reynolds knew that restraining the Navy’s use of midfrequency sonar would meet with intense resistance, both legally and politically.

LFA sonar remained an experimental, long-range submarine detection system operating from just a few research vessels. Midfrequency sonar, by contrast, was the primary tactical submarine detection system mounted on virtually all the Navy’s warships—thanks to Admiral Dick Pittenger’s efforts in the 1980s. Details of its sonar capabilities were among the Navy’s most closely guarded secrets, which was one reason that the Navy had never submitted its training exercises for environmental review. If Reynolds went after midfrequency sonar in court, he assumed that the Navy would mobilize all of its resources to derail the litigation and would do everything in its power to defy a court-ordered injunction.

But with consensus finally building in the scientific community about the link between sonar and mass strandings, it was hard for Reynolds to see an alternative to legal action.

A 2004 report by the International Whaling Commission’s Scientific Committee concluded: “The accumulated evidence is very convincing and appears overwhelming, associating midfrequency military sonar with atypical beaked whale mass strandings.” Even more remarkably, a 2004 study of mass strandings by the military think tank the Jasons—a study commissioned by the Navy and co-authored by Walter Munk and a dozen other physicists—began by declaring: “We would like to state at the outset that the evidence of sonar causation is, in our opinion, completely convincing and that therefore there is a serious issue of how best to avoid and minimize future beaching events.”
⁴

Similar conclusions were reached in a 2005 study published by the International Council on the Exploration of the Seas, and another by the National Research Council. Within a few years of NRDC’s low-frequency sonar victory, almost all the major marine science organizations were sounding the alarm about sonar and whales.

Europeans were taking coordinated steps to limit sonar exercises in their waters. The European Parliament called on its 25 member states to stop deploying high-intensity active naval sonar until more was known about the harm it inflicted on whales and other marine life. Citing the growing body of scientific research that confirmed “a significant threat to marine mammals, fish, and other ocean wildlife,” the resolution called on member states to “immediately restrict the use of high-intensity active naval sonars in waters falling under their jurisdiction.” Spain took the lead by banning sonar exercises in the waters surrounding the Canary Islands following the 2004 Majestic Eagle strandings.