War of the Whales (59 page)

Part 4, of White Beluga: from William Scoresby Jr.’s 1820 book
An account of the Arctic regions with a history and description of the northern whale-fishery.

CHAPTER HEAD ILLUSTRATIONS

F. Wenderoth Saunders, from Ivan T. Sanderson’s
Follow the Whale
(New York: Bramhall House, 1956).

IN-TEXT GRAPHICS

Page 156

Pidwirny, M. (2006). “Surface and Subsurface Ocean Currents: Ocean Current Map.”
Fundamentals of Physical Geography, 2nd Edition.
Public domain. U.S. government publication. http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/8q_1.html.

Page 159

From “The Heard Island Feasibility Test,” Walter H. Munk, et al.,
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
Vol. 96, No. 4, October 1994.

Page 322

Sourced from GlobalSecurity.org and US Department of the Navy

PHOTO INSERT

1, 5, 7, 10, 11, 26, 27, 37, 38: Photo by Ken Balcomb

2: Photo by Charlotte Dunn

3, 40, 41, 42: Photo by Joshua Horwitz

4: Photo by John Calambokidis, Cascadia Research

6, 8: Photo by Diane Claridge

9: Photo by Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey

12: Courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

13: Courtesy of WHOI Computerized Scanning and Imaging Facility, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

14: Photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution

15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 43: Courtesy of Ken Balcomb

18: Photo by Robert S. Balcomb

29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34: Courtesy of Joel Reynolds

35: Photo by Vidal Martin of SECAC

36: Photo by permission of Prof. Antonio Fernández (Institute Animal Health), University Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain

39: Photo by Michael J. Elderman, provided by UC Riverside

AUTHOR’S NOTES ON SOURCES AND INTERVIEWS

Much of the information in this book derives from interviews with more than 100 individuals, as well as from oral histories (most significantly from the Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, in College Park, Maryland), from memoirs, and unpublished articles, ship logs, and personal papers.

A list of individuals I interviewed, either by phone or in person, begins on page 390 of this section. Key sources were interviewed multiple times, and many of the interviews were tape-recorded to ensure accuracy. Every effort has been made to report group meetings accurately, based on interviews with multiple participants.

In addition, I drew information from a range of books, articles in newspapers, magazines, and peer-reviewed science and law journals; investigative reports by the US Navy and the National Marine Fisheries Service; proceedings of marine mammal science conferences, transcripts of legal proceedings, and published court decisions. Many of these sources are cited in the endnotes. Others are listed below, by chapter.

I reported many of the scenes in the book from locations in Southern California; Hawaii; the San Juan Islands of Washington State; Baja, Mexico; the Bahamas; and Woods Hole, Massachusetts; as well as from marine mammal science conferences in the United States and abroad.

SOURCES

Part One: Stranded

The narration of the March 15, 2000, mass stranding and subsequent specimen collection is drawn from eyewitness and newspaper accounts; from photographs and videotape recorded by members of the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey who documented the event; from postings on the MARMAM marine mammal Listserv; from on-site reporting on Abaco Island in the Bahamas; from peer-reviewed journal articles; and from the Navy and National Marine Fisheries Service joint interim report released on December 21, 2001. The most precise linear narrative of the stranding and its aftermath is Balcomb and Claridge’s peer-reviewed and published report: K. C. Balcomb and D. E. Claridge, “A mass Stranding of Cetaceans Caused by Naval Sonar in the Bahamas,”
Bahamas Journal of Science
8, no. 2 (May 2001): 4–6.

Key interview subjects included Ken Balcomb, Diane Claridge, Dave Ellifrit, and Bob Gisiner.

Information in these chapters regarding beaked whale evolution and echolocation was drawn from documents cited in the endnotes and from interviews with Jim Mead of the Smithsonian Institution and Darlene Ketten of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Information about Ken Balcomb’s childhood, early research career, Navy tours, and work aboard the
Regina Maris
is drawn largely from interviews with Ken Balcomb, three of his four wives, including Diane Claridge, childhood friends, and his half brother Howie Garrett, as well as protégé researchers Dave Ellifrit and John Durban.

Much of the background information about the Navy’s Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) comes from interviews with naval historian Gary Weir, as well as from his book
An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment
(College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), and his article “The American Sound Surveillance System: Using the Ocean to Hunt Soviet Submarines, 1950–1961,”
International Journal of Naval History
5, no. 2 (August 2006).

Information about the early response to the stranding by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and the Navy Office of Environmental Readiness (N-45) is drawn from interviews with multiple individuals, including: at ONR, Bob Gisiner, Jim MacEachern, and Admiral Paul Gaffney; at NMFS, Roger Gentry, Blair Mase, Bill Hogarth, Teri Rowles, Janet Whaley, and Laurie Allen; at N-45, Admiral Larry Baucom, Frank Stone, and Marc Laverdiere.

Part Two: Acoustic Storm

The information about NRDC, its first response to the Bahamas stranding, and its campaign to save the whale nursery in Laguna San Ignacio in Baja, Mexico, comes primarily from interviews with individuals at NRDC, including Michael Jasny, Andrew Wetzler, John Adams, Stephen Mills, Joel Reynolds, and Jacob Scherr.

Other information about the Baja whale campaign and gray whales was drawn from various news reports and articles, and from Dick Russell,
Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Information about Joel Reynolds’ childhood and early legal career—in these chapters and in chapter 11—was drawn from interviews with Joel Reynolds, his five siblings and two former wives, and colleagues.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from articles and interviews with Darlene Ketten, and interviews with Ken Balcomb, Charlie Potter, and Diane Claridge.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Steve Honigman, Joel Reynolds, Lindy Weilgart, Hal Whitehead, Sam Ridgway, and John Hall.

Information in this chapter comes primarily from videotape of the beachside necropsy and interviews with Ken Balcomb, Darlene Ketten, Roger Gentry, and Larry Baucom.

Information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Richard Danzig, Robert Pirie, Admiral Dick Pittenger, Admiral Bill Fallon, Admiral Bob Natter, Admiral Paul Gaffney, Darlene Ketten, and Jim MacEachern.

Information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Admiral Dick Pittenger, Walter Munk, Mel Briscoe, Robert Frosch, Fred Saalfeld, Chris Clark, Lindy Weilgart, Hal Whitehead, Craig Dorman, Steven Ramberg, Dan Costa, Bob Gisiner, Sylvia Earle, John Adams, Peter Tyack, Katy Payne, Joel Reynolds, Annie Notthoff, Susan Jordan, Naomi Oreskes, and Naomi Rose.

Information about the Jasons, the military think tank of academic physicists, is drawn largely from Ann Finkbeiner’s book
The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite
(New York: Viking, 2006).

Information in this chapter comes from articles cited in the endnotes and from interviews with Joel Reynolds, Steve Honigman, John Hall, Michael Jasny, Andrew Wetzler, Hal Whitehead, Peter Tyack, Dan Costa, and Chris Clark.

W. John Richardson et al.,
Marine Mammals and Noise
(San Diego: Academic Press, 1995).

Michael Jasny et al.,
Sounding the Depths II: The Rising Toll of Sonar, Shipping and Industrial Ocean Noise on Marine Life
(New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, 2005).

Information in this chapter comes primarily from videotape recorded by Ken Balcomb, Darlene Ketten’s notes and articles, and interviews with Darlene Ketten, Ken Balcomb, and Diane Claridge.

Part Three: The Reluctant Whistle-Blower

The information in this chapter is drawn largely from multiple sources, including D. Graham Burnette’s
The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century
(University of Chicago Press, 2012); Gregg Mitman’s
Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and several books by John Lilly, among them
Man and Dolphin
(New York: Doubleday, 1961),
The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence
(New York: Doubleday, 1969),
John Lilly, So Far
 . . . (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989), and
The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography
(Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1996).

The information in this chapter is drawn from multiple news articles and books, as well as interviews with Ken Balcomb. In 1997 PBS’
Frontline
produced an excellent investigative documentary titled
A Whale of a Business
about SeaWorld and the history of captive orcas in the Pacific Northwest, which remains one of the best sources on the subject. Other sources for this chapter include Burnette’s
Sounding of the Whale
and David Rothenberg’s
Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound
(New York: Basic Books, 2008).

In addition to the books cited from chapter 18, the information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Ken Balcomb and articles by and about Ben White.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with John Hall, and from books such as David Helvarg’s
Blue Frontier: Saving America’s Living Seas
(New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001), Forrest G. Wood’s
Marine Mammals and Man: The Navy’s Porpoises and Sea Lions
(Washington, DC: R. B. Luce, 1973), Whitlow Au’s
The Sonar of Dolphins
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), and Paul Nachtigall and Patrick Moore’s
Animal Sonar: Processes and Performance
(New York: Plenum, 1988).

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Ken Balcomb, Joel Reynolds, Jim Mead, Roger Gentry, Charlie Potter, Sam Ridgway, and Jim MacEachern.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Ken Balcomb, Mel Briscoe, Roger Gentry, and Diane Claridge, and from research by Peter Tyack and Mark Johnson of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution into the diving and sound responses of beaked whales in the Bahamas.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Ken Balcomb, Roger Gentry, Michael Stocker, David Fromm, and several former Navy fleet commanders, as well as from the Navy and NMFS’ interim report on the Bahamas stranding, released in December 2001.

Part Four: Whales v. Navy

The information in this chapter comes primarily from court transcripts and interviews with Joel Reynolds, Ken Balcomb, Michael Jasny, Andrew Wetzler, and Joe Johnson.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with members of the NRDC legal team.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from interviews with Admiral Pete Daly, Craig Jensen, Jeff Luster, Joel Reynolds, Michael Jasny, and Dick Pittenger.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from on-site reporting of the Supreme Court oral arguments, from court documents and transcripts, and from interviews with the legal teams on both sides.

The information in this chapter comes primarily from law review articles and newspaper accounts, and from interviews with Joel Reynolds, Mitch Bernard, Dick Pittenger, Pete Daly, and Ken Balcomb.

INTERVIEWS

The author conducted one or more in-person or telephone interviews with the following individuals. Most have changed jobs and titles during the 20 years covered in this narrative.
The job titles below refer to each person’s position at the time that he or she was an active participant in the narrative
.

National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS/NOAA) Current or Former Officials