War of the Whales (23 page)

To judge by the gaiety, a passerby might have mistaken the necropsy under way outside Ken and Diane’s house for a festive beach party. But instead of conch fritters and beer lining the wooden picnic table, it was groaning under the weight of a defrosting Cuvier’s head, which was quickly attracting flies.

Much to Balcomb’s relief, Alan Bater and Ruth Ewing had stayed behind in Grand Bahama. The Earthlings were in attendance, but they hung back at a respectful distance while Darlene Ketten prepared to conduct her master class in ear anatomy and head dissection. Dave Ellifrit videotaped the proceedings.

Everyone was in exceptionally high spirits, especially Balcomb. The world’s leading expert in beaked whale hearing was about to give a tutorial using
his
specimen. Ketten seemed equally elated. It seemed as if every time she rushed to a beaked whale stranding, she was disappointed to find badly decayed remains. She’ d certainly never seen anything as fresh as the two heads Ken and Diane had collected. Earlier that morning, they’ d decided to dissect the jawbone and the ears from the Cuvier’s and leave the Blainville’s intact for CT scanning and necropsy back in the States.

Wearing a white smock over her shorts and T-shirt, Ketten flexed her fingers underneath latex gloves and circled the picnic bench in her bare feet, appraising the head from every angle. She asked Balcomb some polite questions about his photo-ID work, which he was pleased to answer. Then she shifted her questioning to the condition of the whale head, which she determined had finally thawed out enough for dissection.

“As you can see, this guy was hit pretty bad by sharks,” Balcomb explained. “My guess is he was alive and bleeding when they started to attack, which is why there was so little blood inside when we found him.”

“Was there any blood coming out the pinna?” she asked, referring to the vestigial cetacean ear holes, no longer used for hearing. “Or the eyes?”

“No blood from the eyes or ear holes. The eyes were bubbling a little bit. But it was postmortem fluid, mostly, probably juicy from pressure.”

“Remarkably fresh specimen. Really extraordinary.” Ketten assessed the head with the discerning appreciation that Balcomb remembered seeing on the faces of tuna merchants at Tokyo fish auctions. She selected a green-handled scalpel from her kit and excised a blubber sample from the back of the head. “See how white and smooth this blubber is?” she asked, displaying the specimen for the Earthlings. “You can see the collagen running in white strips, here. That’s what makes it so resilient.”

After securing the blubber in a plastic sample bag, she selected an entry point at the back of the jawbone. “The acoustic fats along the jawbone are a very different story, as you’ll see.” She cut a clean slice all the way down the rostrum. “Look at what we’ve got here. An entirely intact lobe of acoustic fats along the length of the auditory canal! I need a picture of this. Dave, come get a close-up. This is so cool! I’ve never seen this before. Low-density fats in the auditory canal! Ken, this turned out better than I had dared to hope.”

Balcomb was blushing under his salt-and-pepper beard. “You really have Dave to thank for this head.” He motioned to Ellifrit behind the video camera. “I’ d never have been able to get it off the beach without his help.”

Ketten carefully finished resecting the acoustic fat lobe and presented it for all to admire. It was the size and shape of a large salmon fillet but the color of pale ivory. She held up the lobe to her own jaw and moved her head in a lunging motion to mime how beaked whales use the acoustic fats like a receiving antenna for incoming sound waves. “We humans have an internal air cavity to conduct sound from the air to our eardrum,” she told the Earthlings. “But whales use these acoustic fats, which are almost precisely matched to the density of salt water. They create a low-impedance channel that conducts the incoming sound straight up the jawbone to the ear bone.”

Once the specimen was safely triple-bagged and tagged, Ketten shifted her attention to the ears. “Ordinarily, this would all be greenish and putrefied,” she said as she exposed the tissue covering the ear bone. “But see, it looks like teriyaki. Still dark red with myoglobin,” she said, referring to the iron-rich protein. “I can’t wait to see the ear.”

When she got close to the tympanic bone, Ketten motioned the Earthlings to come closer. “Look here, where you can see the stapes tucked in behind the bulla. The stapes is the smallest bone in the body, and it’s connected to the largest proportional muscle, the stapedial ligament, which they use to attenuate sound. These animals can put out two hundred twenty decibels at the source, but they can shut down their own receivers before they make that noise. When they know a loud sound is coming, they can turn down the volume, the same way you’ d turn down a hearing aid. The problems happen when they don’t have time to turn down the volume before a loud sound arrives.”

Switching to a flat blade, Ketten slowly, carefully wedged the tympanic bulla free from the ligaments. It was the size and shape of a small conch shell in her hand. “Look at that. This turned out great. A beautiful job,” she said, in matter-of-fact appreciation of her own work.

Diane Ketten dissecting the ears from a Cuvier’s whale head on Abaco Island, March 20, 2000.

Ear bone extracted from a Cuvier’s beaked whale, Abaco Island, March 20, 2000.

Everyone crowded in to admire the ear bone. “This is beautiful,” said Ketten as she rotated the bone in her hand. “Look: this auditory nerve is in perfect shape. It’s gorgeous! I love it. The facial nerve is good too; it’s huge because there are so many jaw muscles to control. Look at that condition of that nerve—fabulous.”

Then her smile gave way to a frown. “Hmm . . . There are two things I don’t like about the way this ear looks. The round window is filled with blood. So is the cochlear aqueduct.”

An hour later, Ketten had removed the second ear, injected it with formalin, and submerged each ear in a carefully labeled jar of fixative. She was eager to get the Cuvier’s head back to the freezer at Nancy’s Restaurant, so they swatted away the flies and wrapped it carefully in plastic garbage bags. Then, under Ketten’s watchful gaze, Balcomb stowed the formalin jars holding the ear bones in a locked filing cabinet in his office.

Ketten wanted to escort the head back to storage. After inspecting Les’ bait freezer, she was satisfied that the specimens were being kept at a constant temperature. But she was unhappy with the fact that it didn’t have a lock. After they’ d replaced the head, she wrapped the freezer lid with yellow tamper-evident tape and signed and dated the chain-of-custody form. She explained to Balcomb and Claridge that they needed to sign and date the same form when they removed the specimens for transport to Boston. She expressed optimism that Fisheries could clear the import paperwork within a week or ten days.

“I want these two heads up at my lab at Harvard, where we can get a better look at them inside the scanner,” said Ketten. “The dolphin too. Then we’ll take them down to Woods Hole for a proper necropsy.”

Though he didn’t want to spoil the collegial mood, Balcomb needed explicit reassurance from Ketten that he and Claridge would be included in the ongoing investigation after they delivered the heads. And as a lifelong collector of beaked whale skulls, he wanted to get the heads back from Fisheries once the final necropsies had been completed. Ketten agreed to his conditions.

They had time for a late lunch before Ketten’s flight. She was highly complimentary of the conch salad Les served them on his back porch, comparing it favorably to the octopus she’ d recently enjoyed in Greece.

“You’ve done good work,” said Ketten, raising her Kalik beer bottle toward Balcomb and Claridge. “I can’t tell you how often I get on a plane to Timbuktu and come back with nothing to show for it. This has been a rare pleasure.”

“To the ‘volunteers’ who brought you here,” Balcomb toasted. They clinked their three bottles together as one.

It had only taken 48 hours from its first reports for the story to go national. Admiral Baucom stared glumly at the clippings that bulged out of his
Early Bird
briefing file. Dozens of papers across the country had picked up a full-length Associated Press article connecting the Navy to the Bahamas stranding. Meanwhile, the headline of the article in the
Washington Post
read: “Whales Became Stranded After U.S. Naval Exercises; Bahamas Incidents Drawing Scrutiny.”

The Navy public affairs office, in concert with a cluster of internal lawyers, had crafted an artfully ambiguous response to the incident. Reading the AP article, Admiral Baucom wasn’t altogether sure what to make of the Navy statement. It
seemed
to acknowledge that ONR was conducting research on the north side of Abaco Island—while at the same time insisting that it couldn’t possibly be related to the stranding. Frank Stone and the Navy JAG attorney assigned to N-45 stood behind Baucom’s desk, reading over his shoulder.

FREEPORT, Bahamas—Eight whales beached and died soon after the U.S. Navy conducted anti-submarine exercises off the northern Bahamas, prompting an investigation and calls for an end to the exercises.

The Navy said Tuesday that there was no evidence to link the whale deaths to last week’s exercise testing sonar detection of submarines.

Navy Cmdr. Greg Smith said the tests took place from about 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. March 15 off Abaco Island as part of a series of exercises testing “sonar buoys” that were to continue through March 22.

Marine biologist Ken Balcomb of the Earthwatch environmental group said beachings began that same day, and within two days at least 14 whales had grounded themselves on Abaco, Grand Bahama to the north, and Eleuthera to the south. Eight died, prompting investigations by Bahamian and U.S. scientists and authorities.

“A whale beaching in the Bahamas is a once-in-a-decade occurrence,” said Balcomb, an American who has been studying whales around Abaco Island for nine years. “We will be making recommendations to the Bahamian government that these sort of exercises be terminated,” he said. “The fact that it coincides with the military exercises cannot be just coincidental.”

But the Navy spokesman said there was no evidence linking the two events. “My understanding of the actual locations would put the island between the operations where the sonobuoys were located and where the whales eventually beached themselves,” said Smith.

He said the exercise had nothing to do with Low Frequency Active sonar, a new and controversial system that transmits sonar pulses so loud they can match the roar of a rocket launch. . . .

The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, responsible for overseeing all U.S. actions that could affect the environment at home or abroad, said it approved the Navy’s Environmental Assessment for its exercise.

Roger Gentry, coordinator of the service’s acoustics team, said the exercises shouldn’t have affected the whales. “Yet we have beached whales.”

Baucom was still new to his desk job, but he understood that leading the
Early Bird
two days in a row was bad news. National coverage meant the stranding investigation would be conducted in a media spotlight.

“What’s the story with this marine biologist?” he asked. “And who the hell is he to recommend that the Bahamians terminate these kinds of exercises?”

Stone explained that Balcomb was the field researcher who collected the whale heads right after the stranding. That’s all he knew about him.

Ever since the stranding five days earlier, Stone had been in constant communication with Bob Gisiner at ONR and with Fleet Command in Norfolk. Information was the most valuable currency inside his world, and he’ d always tried to be the best-informed person in a crisis room. He’ d compiled a detailed diagram of the fleet’s movements in the Bahamas on March 15, which appeared to correspond in time and place with the reported locations of the strandings.