War of the Whales (34 page)

In 1946, 15 whaling nations established the International Whaling Commission with the stated goal “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.” The idea of preserving whale populations for purposes other than killing and processing them into margarine and motor oil was still 20 years in the future. And it would be fully 40 years before the International Whaling Commission called a halt to commercial whaling worldwide in 1986.

During those intervening four decades, whales would undergo a radical cultural transformation from commercial commodity to entertainment superstars and revered icons of the New Age, environmental, and animal rights movements. Where once their value was measured in the price per barrel of their oil, whales and dolphins would suddenly become box-office sensations, drawing millions of admiring customers to movie theaters, aquariums, and theme parks, and, in time, to open-sea whale-watching venues around the world.

One of the unlikely catalysts of this cultural sea change was the cadre of scientific researchers—almost all of them funded by the US Navy—who first studied and appreciated whales as more than mere casks of oil. Some of these early investigators were so transfigured by their close encounters with whales and dolphins that they abandoned their research careers to become public advocates for whale conservation, and even liberation.

•  •  •

The impetus for the Navy’s decades-long investment in whale research was a bat-obsessed biology student named Donald Griffin. In 1940, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Griffin conceived an experiment to solve a 200-year-old zoology puzzle known as “Spallanzani’s bat problem.” Lazzaro Spallanzani had been an eighteenth-century Italian naturalist who hypothesized, after alternately blinding and deafening bats, that they navigated in the dark using sound rather than sight. But because bats transmitted their high-frequency sound signals
above
the human hearing threshold, they
appeared
to be flying in silence. This conundrum left Spallanzani unable to explain precisely how bats navigate in pitch-black caves.

When Griffin learned that Harvard’s physics department had recently invented an ultrasonic sound detector, he hoped this new technology might be the key to unlocking Spallanzani’s “problem.” He constructed an elaborate maze of hanging wires in a blacked-out basement laboratory, which he then equipped with ultrasonic sound receivers. The bats successfully navigated the maze in total darkness, and the ultrasonic receivers enabled Griffin to record the squeaky clicks of their ultrahigh-frequency sound emissions. He deduced correctly that the bats were navigating by the echoes from their clicks, a method that he named “echolocation.” Griffin later demonstrated that bats also employed echolocation to hunt in the dark, using different frequency transmissions depending on the size of the insects they were hunting.

The Navy, always on the lookout for ways to improve its radar and sonar capabilities, immediately took an interest in Griffin’s findings. After ONR began supporting his research into animal behavior, Griffin speculated that mammals
other
than bats might navigate by echolocation—
notably, whales in the lightless ocean depths
.
²
This provocative supposition encouraged the Navy—in service to its antisubmarine warfare mission—to embark on a decades-long effort to confirm, describe, decode, and deploy cetacean biosonar.

There was nothing novel about the idea of recruiting animals into warfare. Elephants, camels, and horses had conveyed soldiers, supplies, and arms into battles for centuries. Soldiers had long trained dogs to attack enemies, sniff out bombs, guard facilities, and, in the case of the Soviet army in World War II, to run under enemy tanks with explosives strapped to their backs. During the same war, the British Air Ministry Pigeon Section deployed a quarter million homing pigeons as military messengers—32 of which were awarded the Dickin Medal “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to service.” Not to be outdone by its ally across the Atlantic, the US military developed the Bat Bomb Project, which hoped to use bats as flying incendiary devices for the firebombing of Tokyo.
³

But Griffin’s discovery of animal echolocation transformed the quest to harness an animal’s unique sensory talents for military advantage. Instead of merely training animals to fight, Griffin inspired naval engineers to renew a centuries-old tradition of looking to biology for design inspiration. Leonardo da Vinci modeled ship hulls on the fish and marine mammals he illustrated. The Wright Brothers adopted a fixed-wing design for their first airplane after observing that large birds glided with almost no wing movement. In the 1950s, engineers called animal-inspired technology biomimetics and biomimicry, derived from the Greek
bios
, for “life,” and
mimesis
, for “imitation.” However, it was the term “bionics,” the compound of “biology
”
and “electronics,” that the Navy adopted to describe its research and development of technology that could rival the biosonar talents of a dolphin.

•  •  •

Before the US Navy became the leading patron of modern cetology, whale science had relied primarily on whalers’ observations of the behavior of their prey. The only research expeditions of any note had been the Discovery Investigations in the 1920s and 1930s led by British scientists who culled anatomical specimens from the decks of whaling ships working the waters near Antarctica.

The Navy chose a tamer setting to test Griffin’s hypothesis of cetacean biosonar. Marine Studios, originally built in the 1930s as a film set for underwater movies, was stocked with dolphins, seals, and sharks captured from the waters near St. Augustine, Florida. After closing during the war, it reopened as Marineland, the nation’s first marine park.

Marineland’s live shows starring trained dolphins gave tens of thousands of visitors their first close-up view of small whales. Just a decade earlier, dolphins had been despised by fishermen who derided them as “pig fish” and “herring hogs” for poaching fish from their nets. But with the rising celebrity of Flippy, Splash, and Zippy—whose balletic performances were broadcast live on CBS-TV’s
Marineland Carnival
—dolphins began a long run as America’s marine mammal sweethearts.

A marine park turned out to be a good laboratory for conducting dolphin research. Man-made tanks bore little resemblance to a dolphin’s natural habitat, but compared to the dark oceans, they offered early investigators a transparent and controlled research environment. Dolphins, highly social and responsive to training, could provide direct feedback to stimuli much the way that a human subject could, pressing levers in response to commands and even vocalizing. Navy-funded studies at Marineland marked cetology’s transition from a “dead science,” based on examination of scavenged remains from beaches and whaling stations, to a “life science” of controlled experimentation and observation, first in captive settings and later in the wild.

The young biologist-psychologist who served as the curator of Marineland, Arthur McBride, became fascinated by the extraordinary range of sounds emerging from the dolphin tanks. Aristotle had recorded his observations of dolphin vocalizations thousands of years earlier in his
Historia Animalium
, but McBride was the first scientist to remark on the biosonar possibilities of their barks, grunts, clicks, whistles, moans, and distinctive “creaking door” sound. Having heard from local fishermen about the dolphins’ ability to evade their nets in Florida’s opaque St. John’s River, McBride noted in his journals that “this behavior calls to mind the sonic sending and receiving apparatus which enables the bat to avoid obstacles in the dark.” In 1947, with the aid of “a supersonic sending and receiving apparatus” provided by the newly formed Office of Naval Research, McBride began to measure dolphin responses to ultrasonic frequencies.

In 1951 ONR dispatched William Schevill and his research partner and wife, Barbara Lawrence, from Woods Hole to Marineland to test Griffin’s and McBride’s hypothesis of dolphin echolocation. After recording the full range of dolphin vocalizations and verifying the acuity of their hearing, Schevill and Lawrence transported one of the animals back to Woods Hole for further tests. Working at night in a pond, they confirmed the dolphins’ ability to navigate around nets in the dark, muddy water.

At the same time, ONR was funding research by Winthrop Kellogg, a psychologist at Florida State University. With the assistance of then undergraduate marine biologist Sylvia Earle, Kellogg established that dolphins consistently swam around a transparent Plexiglas wall, even in darkness. By 1953, Kellogg and the Schevills had independently published research demonstrating that the dolphins’ “rusty-hinge” vocalization was actually a series of rapid clicks with a wideband frequency spectrum that they used to navigate, hunt, and communicate.

Finally, Ken Norris, a World War II Navy veteran and curator of Marineland’s newly opened sister park, Marineland of the Pacific, in Southern California, conclusively proved dolphin echolocation. Norris, who would later mentor Balcomb, Gisiner, and Gentry at UC Santa Cruz, outfitted a bottlenose dolphin named Zippy with suction cup blindfolds to demonstrate that he could navigate a maze of pipes suspended in a tank. Zippy accurately echolocated objects at a distance of 30 feet. Later research revealed that dolphin biosonar far outmatched the Navy’s active sonar technology in every dimension. Dolphins could detect a target the size of a tangerine from 300 feet away, and could distinguish between an aluminum and an iron plate, a hollow tube and a solid one, and ball bearings of microscopically different sizes. Dolphins could discriminate 5,000 individual clicks per seconds, compared to a human’s ability to detect 30 per second.

Kellogg expressed the consensus view of his research colleagues when he reported to ONR, “What these animals can do has a definite bearing on our national defense, as a means of improving man-made sonar.”

•  •  •

The improbable ascent of whales from raw material for dog food to cultural icons and prized naval assets was propelled, as much as anyone, by an eccentric neuroscientist who tirelessly promoted his passion for small whales and their big brains. John Lilly was the progenitor of two parallel and, eventually, intersecting crusades: the Navy’s drive to decode cetacean communication and the conservation community’s campaign to save the whales.
⁴

In many ways, Lilly’s career mirrored Walter Munk’s. They were both fugitives from successful banking families—Lilly hailed from Saint Paul, Minnesota; Munk from Vienna. Like Munk, Lilly ran away to California and ended up at the California Institute of Technology, where he immersed himself in physics, biology, and human physiology. Coincidentally, their paths crossed during their senior years, when Lilly and Munk were co-presidents of the CalTech ski club that Munk had founded the year before. When Munk moved on to graduate school at Scripps, Lilly went east to medical school at Dartmouth College, where he studied brain physiology and began inventing medical instruments. During the war, the US Army Air Forces recruited Lilly to study problems of high-altitude flight at its aeromedical lab in Columbus, Ohio. By the war’s end, Lilly had migrated to the top of the “preferred list” of scientists compiled by the War Manpower Commission.

Like oceanography, neurology was in its infancy in the 1950s, the brain as uncharted and unexplored as the ocean depths. Lilly’s training in neurophysiology, combined with his aptitude for electronic engineering, placed him in the front ranks of neuroscientists who were parsing the boundaries separating the brain, the mind, and the psyche. To prepare himself for what he called his “implorations” of human consciousness, Lilly underwent psychoanalysis and earned his certification as a psychoanalyst.

During a decade of neurological research at the National Institutes of Health, Lilly created the first atlas of the primate central nervous system. While Munk was deconstructing ocean wave patterns, Lilly was inventing the first electrical waveform that could stimulate brain cells. He also engineered a narrow-gauge stainless-steel sleeve that could penetrate a primate skull without anesthesia. By inserting a thin tungsten electrode through this guide, Lilly could stimulate the deep structures of the brain—specifically, the brain of the macaque monkey, Lilly’s animal model for cortical mapping.

Lilly strapped the monkey into a chair and clamped its head securely in place. With a single strike of a claw hammer, he pounded the sleeve guide through the monkey’s skull, and then lowered the tungsten electrode through the cortex and into the deeper regions of the brain. Once the electrode was in place, Lilly delivered an electric pulse to the “primitive” areas controlling pleasure and pain, evoking telltale expressions of excitement or fear. While the image of a monkey with hundreds of wires protruding from his skull was ghoulish in the extreme, Lilly took pride in how little pain and risk of infection his insertion technique caused.

Within two years, he had completed a blueprint of the neural pathways of pleasure, pain, sex, hunger, thirst, aggression, and fear in the primate brain. But Lilly was frustrated by his finding that the monkey brain seemed to be nothing more than a fuse box of on-off switches for pleasure and pain. What good was mapping the primate brain, he wondered, if it didn’t reveal the secrets of consciousness that lay hidden inside the folds of its gray matter? Lilly was eager to explore a more expansive brainscape.

When Lilly arrived at Marineland in the spring of 1957, he wasn’t interested in dolphins’ prodigious talent for echolocation. He’ d come in search of a big-brained mammal whose cortex he could chart with the same precision that he’ d applied to the brains of cats, rabbits, and monkeys. At a time when scientists considered brain weight to be the primary measure of intelligence, the dolphin appeared to be an Einstein-like species. Compared to the paltry mass of a macaque monkey’s three-ounce brain, the bottlenose dolphin’s gray matter weighed almost four
pounds
—heavier than a human brain and essentially equivalent to human brain weight in relation to total body mass. The biggest-brained mammal of all, the sperm whale, boasted a brain weight of nearly 20 pounds. But there were no captive sperm whales available for experimentation.