War of the Whales: A True Story

by Joshua Horwitz

  Janet Whaley

  Coordinator, Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program.

  Blair Mase

  Regional stranding coordinator for Southeast Fisheries Science Center.

  Don Knowles

  Director, Endangered Species Division, Office of Protected Resources.

  Donna Wieting

  Director, Office of Protected Resources, Marine Mammal Conservation Division.

  Laurie Allen

  Acting director, Office of Protected Resources.

  Kenneth R. Hollingshead

  Head of Permits and Conservation Division, Office of Protected Resources.

  John Proni

  Director of the Ocean Acoustics Division, NOAA.

  Bob Brownell

  Senior scientist, Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

  Phil Clapham

  Senior scientist, Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

  US Navy

  Fleet Command

  Rear Admiral Richard Pittenger

  Director of antisubmarine warfare for the Chief of Naval Operations; Oceanographer of the Navy; later vice president for marine operations, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  Rear Admiral Craig Dorman

  Program director, Antisubmarine Warfare; chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research; later director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  Admiral William Fallon

  Commander, US Second Fleet.

  Admiral Robert J. Natter

  Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations (OPNAV N3/N5).

  Vice Admiral Peter Daly

  Deputy, N3/N5 (Operations, Plans and Strategy) in the Navy staff; deputy commander and chief of staff, US Fleet Forces Command.

  Captain Philip G. Renaud, USN (ret.)

  Executive director of the Living Oceans Foundation.

  Office of Naval Research

  Vice Admiral Paul G. Gaffney II

  Chief of naval research, 1996 to 2000.

  Bob Gisiner

  Manager, Marine Bioacoustics Program.

  Mel Briscoe

  Director, Applied Oceanography and Acoustics Division.

  Captain Paul Stewart

  Deputy director of the Ocean Battlespace Sensing Department; later commanding officer, Naval Research Laboratory.

  Fred Saalfeld

  Deputy chief of naval research, 1993 to 2002.

  Robert Frosch

  Director of research programs for Hudson Laboratories of Columbia University in Dobbs Ferry, New York, under contract to the Office of Naval Research; technical director of Project Artemis, a very large experimental active sonar system development.

  Jim MacEachern

  Acoustician in charge of Littoral Warfare sea tests in the Bahamas in March 2000.

  Steven Ramberg

  Director of science and technology.

  Joe Johnson

  Program manager of Low Frequency Active sonar program from 1994 to 2004.

  Glenn H. Mitchell

  Engineer and biologist, Environmental Planning and Biological Analysis Division, Naval Undersea Warfare Center.

  David Moretti

  Marine mammal science lead, engineering, Test and Evaluation Department, Naval Undersea Warfare Center.

  Office of Environmental Readiness (N-45)

  Rear Admiral Larry Baucom

  Director of the Navy’s Environmental Readiness, Energy and Safety Programs.

  V. Frank Stone

  Head of research and development, Navy’s Environmental Readiness, Energy and Safety Programs.

  Marc Laverdiere

  JAG attorney assigned to N-45.

  Navy Secretariat

  Richard Danzig

  Secretary of the Navy from 1998 to 2001.

  Robert Pirie

  Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Installations and Environment, from 1994 to 2000; later Undersecretary of the Navy and Acting Secretary of the Navy.

  Steven S. Honigman

  General counsel to the Navy, 1993 to 1998.

  Craig Jensen

  Assistant general counsel (Energy, Installations, and Environment).

  Jeff Luster

  Senior counsel, fleet and operational environmental law.

  Scientists and Researchers

  Oceanographers

  Walter Munk

  A physical oceanographer, professor of geophysics emeritus, and the Secretary of the Navy chair at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

  Sylvia Earle

  An American oceanographer, explorer, inventor, author, and lecturer; the chief scientist at NOAA from 1990 to 1992; since 1998, National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

  Marine Mammal Scientists

  Darlene Ketten

  Senior scientist, Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; assistant professor, Department of Otology and Laryngology, Harvard Medical School.

  Peter Tyack

  Senior scientist, Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  Michael Moore

  Senior research specialist, biology, forensic analysis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

  Chris Clark

  Director, Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

  Dan Costa

  Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, University of California, Santa Cruz.

  Sam Ridgway

  Veterinarian who later earned a PhD in neurobiology; one of the founders of the Navy Marine Mammal Program in 1961; editor of the Handbook of Marine Mammals.

  Bill Evans

  Bioacoustician and early researcher in the Navy Marine Mammal Program.

  Whitlow Au

  Chief scientist, Marine Mammal Research Program, Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology; electrical engineer who has researched dolphin biosonar for the Navy Marine Mammal Program for decades.

  Paul Nachtigall

  Director, Marine Mammal Research Program, Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology. Experimental psychologist with research focus on bioacoustics and echolocation of dolphins and small whales.

  Patrick Moore

  Senior life scientist, National Marine Mammal Foundation.

  Hal Whitehead

  Professor, Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

  Lindy Weilgart

  Research associate, Dalhousie University.

  Ken Balcomb

  Founder, executive director, and principal investigator, Center for Whale Research.

  Diane Claridge

  Co-founder and director, Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation.

  Dave Ellifrit

  Field biologist, photo-identification specialist, Center for Whale Research.

  John Durban

  Research coordinator, Center for Whale Research; population ecologist, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries Service.

  Naomi Rose

  Senior scientist, Humane Society International; currently marine mammal scientist, Animal Welfare Institute.

  Roger Payne

  Biologist; humpback whale researcher; founder, Ocean Alliance.

  Katy Payne

  Humpback whale researcher when married to Roger Payne; founder, in 1999, of Elephant Listening Project at Bioacoustics Research Program, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

  Jim Mead

  Curator of marine mammals at Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, from 1972 to 2009; currently curator emeritus.

  Charlie Potter

  Collection manager, marine mammals, Smithsonian Institution.

  Chris Parsons

  Director of the research and education departments of the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust from 1998 to 2003.

  Robin Baird

  Beaked whale researcher at Cascadia Research Collective.

  John Hall

  Dolphin trainer for the Navy Marine Mammal Training Program; later marine mammal biologist at SeaWorl
d.

  Howard Garrett

  Co-founder and director, Orca Network.

  Acousticians

  Michael Stocker

  Director, Ocean Conservation Research.

  Jim Cummings

  Founder, Acoustic Ecology Institute.

  David Fromm

  Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC; acoustics and computational physics leader on acoustic modeling of Bahamas stranding.

  Bill Ellison

  Founder, CEO, and chief scientist of Marine Acoustics; lead ONR contractor for acoustic assessments.

  NRDC

  Joel Reynolds

  Senior attorney and head of Los Angeles office; later western director. Founder and director, NRDC’s Marine Mammal Protection Project.

  Michael Jasny

  Senior policy advocate; later director of NRDC’s Marine Mammal Protection Project.

  Mitch Bernard

  NRDC’s litigation director.

  Jacob Scherr

  Director, global strategy and advocacy.

  John Adams

  Founding director, executive director, and president from 1970 to 2006.

  Andrew Wetzler

  Senior attorney; later director of Land and Wildlife Program.

  Annie Notthoff

  Director, California advocacy, San Francisco.

  Historians

  D. Graham Burnette

  Professor of history, Princeton University.

  Gary Weir

  Chief historian, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

  Owen Coté

  Associate director, Security Studies Program, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  Naomi Oreskes

  Professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego; adjunct professor of geosciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

  RECOMMENDED READING AND RESOURCES

  Whales, it turns out, are terrific subjects for books, photographs, movies, and other media. So are submarines. Below is a concise selection of books, videos, and online resources I found particularly engaging and informative during my research for this book.

  BOOKS

  The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century by D. Graham Burnette (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a thought-provoking and fascinating chronicle of the scientific investigation of whales, by the rare scholar who’s a pleasure to read.

  The most wide-ranging and best-illustrated book about the complex, conflicted relationship between cetaceans and Homo sapiens is still Richard Ellis’ Men and Whales (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

  An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment by historian Gary E. Weir (Texas A&M University Press, 2001) is a comprehensive history of the US Navy’s patronage of oceanography in the twentieth century.

  For an engaging one-volume history of submersibles, read The Navy Times Book of Submarines: A Political, Social, and Military History by Brayton Harris, edited by Walter J. Boyne (Berkley Books, 1997).

  My favorite nonfiction book ever written about the “silent service” of Cold War submariners is Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew (Harper Perennial, 2000).

  Ann Finkbeiner’s The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite (Viking, 2006) is the only book ever written about this shadowy military think tank, and a very good read.

  Dick Russell’s Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia (Simon & Schuster, 2001) narrates the natural history and remarkable annual migration of the California gray whale.

  Here’s where the long, strange trip into interspecies communication all began: John Lilly’s Man and Dolphin: Adventures on a New Scientific Frontier (Doubleday, 1961).

  Take a trip back to the 1970s at the apex of metaphysical speculation on cetacean consciousness with Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins (Scribner, 1974), edited by Joan McIntyre, with essays, poems, and discourses by the pantheon of Save the Whales apostles, from John Lilly to Paul Spong to Farley Mowat.

  The “official story,” but still the most detailed account of the US Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, by its first director, Forrest G. Wood: Marine Mammals and Man: The Navy’s Porpoises and Sea Lions (R. B. Luce, 1973).

  For great reporting on worldwide ocean ecology and culture, read David Helvarg’s Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness (Sierra Club Books, 2006).

  The most authoritative and beautifully photographed book about orcas is Killer Whales: The Natural History and Genealogy of Orcinus Orca in British Columbia and Washington State by John K. B. Ford, Graeme M. Ellis, and Kenneth C. Balcomb (University of Washington Press, 2000).

  Roger Payne’s memoir of his forays into whale research and activism, Among Whales (Scribner, 1995) remains a fascinating read 20 years later.

  For an informed and provocative investigation into whale songs and music across species, tune in to Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg (Basic Books, 2008).

  Two recently published cultural histories of whales, by authors with voice and humor, are Joe Roman’s Whale (Reaktion Books, 2006) and The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea by Philip Hoare (HarperCollins, 2010).

  ONLINE RESOURCES

  You can find range of links to online resources on my book website: warofthewhales.com, including the ones below.

  Whale evolution is artfully illustrated in two short animated videos: from the Smithsonian Institution, ocean.si.edu/ocean-videos/evolution-whales-animation; and from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, collections.tepapa.govt.nz/exhibitions/whales/Segment.aspx?irn=161.

  Ocean noise pollution and its threat to whales is concisely portrayed in the four-minute animation by Silent Oceans, http://vimeo.com/67804123.

  Two excellent websites devoted to ocean acoustics are the Acoustic Ecology Institute, acousticecology.org; and Discovery of Sound in the Sea, dosits.org.

  A very cool online gallery of CT images of marine mammal ears and other anatomy is viewable at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s CSI Computerized Scanning and Imaging site: http://csi.whoi.edu.

  MARINE CONSERVATION AND RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS WORKING TO REDUCE OCEAN NOISE

  Center for Whale Research, whaleresearch.com

  Natural Resources Defense Council, nrdc.org

  International Fund for Animal Welfare, ifaw.org

  Earthjustice, earthjustice.org

  Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation, bahamaswhales.org

  Whale and Dolphin Conservation, us.whales.org

  World Wildlife Fund, worldwildlife.org

  Oceana, oceana.org

  Animal Legal Defense Fund, aldf.org

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  ENDNOTES

  Chapter 1: The Day the Whales Came Ashore

  1. Marta Azzolini, an Italian intern working with the Bahamas Marine Mammal Survey in the spring of 2000 and one of the strongest swimmers of the group, assisted Diane Claridge by swimming alongside the Cuvier’s whale and guiding him out to deeper water.

  Chapter 2: Castaways

  1. The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) is the US Navy’s premier submarine torpedo and sonar test range. Constructed in the 1960s, AUTEC lies 117 miles east of Florida and 60 miles southwest of Abaco. AUTEC’s Tongue of the Ocean waterway, at the edge of the Great Bahama Bank, is a unique, flat-bottom deep-water basin approximately 110 nautical miles long and 20 nautical miles wide, and a mile deep. Its flat basin floor enabled the Navy to install extensive a
rrays of bottom-mounted hydrophones to make precise measurements of acoustic activity inside and surrounding the range.

  Chapter 3: Taking Heads

  1. Research by Chris Clark at Cornell University on blue whales—which are baleen rather than toothed whales—indicates that they emit very loud sounds at very low frequencies (180 decibels, 14 hertz), which may constitute long-distance echolocation. The idea is that they might bounce their signals off islands, seamounts, or other oceanic features, and, by listening to the returning echo, recognize the “landmark” to locate their position.

  2. The co-evolution of deep-diving beaked whales and squid is described in a journal article by two evolutionary biologists at the University of California at Berkeley: David R. Lindberg and Nicholas D. Pyenson, “Things That Go Bump in the Night: Evolutionary Interactions Between Cephalopods and Cetaceans in the Tertiary,” Lethaia 40, no. 4 (December 2007): 335–43.

  3. Until recently, sperm whales and southern elephant seals had competed with Cuvier’s beaked whales for record for the deepest and longest dives by an air-breathing animal. But in March of 2014, researchers tracking Cuvier’s off the California using electronic tags recorded a record-smashing dive of almost 10,000 feet in depth—the equivalent of eight Empire State Buildings stacked one on top of another. A different Cuvier’s dive was timed at more than two hours, breaking the record of 120 minutes by an elephant seal. Schorr GS, Falcone EA, Moretti DJ, Andrews RD (2014) “First Long-Term Behavioral Records from Cuvier’s Beaked Whales (Ziphius cavirostris) Reveal Record-Breaking Dives.” PLoS ONE 9(3): e92633. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092633.