War of the Whales (42 page)

“There are still many questions about the impact of sound on marine animals. But there is no dispute about how little we know. We cannot allow the Navy to play Russian roulette with our oceans. The question that remains is this: Does the US Navy plan to enter this new century as an environmental steward or as an environmental outlaw? We’re still waiting for their answer.”

Someone killed the TV lights, and Reynolds stepped off the dais to buttonhole a pair of AP reporters. White turned to talk to a TV reporter, and soon they were both laughing aloud at a story White was telling. Naomi Rose invited Balcomb to join her and Reynolds for dinner that night. Balcomb said thanks, but he had an afternoon plane to catch back to Miami.

Balcomb scanned the room for an exit. Ben White and Joel Reynolds were still working the room. Roger Gentry was huddled with his Fisheries colleagues in a far corner. Balcomb grabbed his duffel bag and slipped out the side door.

He hit the street feeling like a beaked whale breaking the surface to breathe after an hourlong dive. All he wanted was to get back to the airport and onto the next plane home to the islands. But he’ d promised a friend—his only real friend in Washington—that he would drop by before leaving town.

•  •  •

Jim Mead was working in his windowless office in the subbasement of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Mead looked less like a museum curator than he did an undersized, bearded woodsman out of a fairy tale. He favored plaid flannel shirts, red suspenders, and a fly fisherman’s vest. After growing up in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he worked alongside his father, an itinerant logger and a contract “high climber,” Mead was desperate to escape the logging life. On a dare from a friend, he applied to Yale University and won a full scholarship to study botany, then biology, then geology, then paleontology, and, eventually, cetology. The first person to hire him out of graduate school was S. Dillon Ripley, the head of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and the future director of the Smithsonian Institution.

As he searched for his friend in the catacombs below the Smithsonian exhibit halls, Balcomb wandered through a series of ill-lit basement corridors that were crammed to the rafters with cetacean skulls and vertebrae—some catalogued, many not, dating back years, decades, and centuries. Balcomb finally found Mead’s office, marked by an enormous papier-mâché mold of a Cuvier’s head mounted like a trophy over the door. Mead was typing away on a manual Smith-Corona, barricaded behind shelves full of books and artifacts collected over four decades of marine mammal research. Flensing knives from whaling countries around the globe hung across his office walls. His bookshelves were piled high with research papers and dog-eared chapbooks on every aspect of whale evolution, morphology, and taxonomy. When Mead greeted him with a warm smile framed by a square-cut white beard, Balcomb felt at ease for the first time since arriving in DC.

Their friendship had been forged three decades earlier in blood, sweat, and vomit. They met during the waning days of Canada’s whaling industry, when they were recruited to survey fin, sei, and humpback whales off the Newfoundland coast. Mead still winced at the memory of that first whale-tagging cruise. Though he’ d been studying whale bones for almost a decade by then, he’ d never been to sea. Balcomb, by contrast, had three seasons of whale tagging off the California coast under his belt, a year of banding birds in the South Pacific atolls, and two full tours with the Navy.

As soon as their round-bottomed boat headed out of the memorably named seaport of Dildo for the Atlantic crossing to Greenland, Mead became violently seasick. He proceeded to retch into the wastepaper basket in their shared cabin for the next three days and nights. Every few hours, Balcomb would empty the wastebasket, pat Mead on the back, and offer him a few words of comfort and a handful of saltines from the galley. When Mead finally got his sea legs, Balcomb taught him how to shoot Discovery tags from the deck of the boat. At night, Mead tutored Balcomb on the morphology of whale skulls and toothed-whale evolution. By the cruise’s end, their friendship was sealed.

Given his proclivity for seasickness, it was probably no accident that Mead made his mark as a shore-based researcher. A few years later, when he became curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, Mead and his field partner, Charlie Potter, plastered the beaches of the mid-Atlantic with leaflets soliciting calls from anyone with news of marine mammal strandings. When the phone rang, Mead and Potter jumped into their pickup truck to scavenge the remains of the beached creatures. Over the next three decades, Mead built the museum’s collections of mammal specimens into the world’s largest, filling subterranean storerooms with whale brains and pinniped penises, sirenian specimens preserved in vats of formaldehyde, and rows of shelves stacked with boxes of whale bones from cetaceans toothed and baleen, great and small. Mead also co-founded the Society for Marine Mammalogy and was elected as one of its early presidents, created the first regional stranding networks, and served as the Marine Mammal Commission’s scientific advisor. All the while, he regularly published his research on beaked whale evolution, anatomy, and morphology.

Jim Mead (
left
), at the Osteo-Prep lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 2002, dissects a narwhal whale specimen with Ted Cranford of San Diego State University and Martin Nweeia of Harvard University.

Mead and Balcomb only saw each other occasionally, catching up over drinks at academic conferences. But they shared a passion for beaked whales, followed each other’s publications, and respected each other’s expertise. Mead was not an activist. By remaining aloof from the political push and pull among the environmentalists, the animal advocates, and the Navy research establishment, Mead had carved out a reputation as an unassailable and nonpartisan expert.

Ever since Charlie Potter returned from the Bahamas the week after the stranding, Mead had begun to rethink his carefully cultivated neutrality. He followed the fallout from the Bahamas stranding on MARMAM and sifted through the emails bouncing between the Washington-based agencies. He deemed most of the speculation about the stranding to be ill informed: 10 percent science and 90 percent politics. As a longtime observer of the Washington policy-and-power game, he knew how quickly the whirlpool of slander and innuendo could pull you under, particularly if, like Balcomb, you lacked the institutional armor of the Navy or, in Mead’s case, the Smithsonian. When he heard that Balcomb was going to challenge the Navy and Fisheries, on their home turf and in front of the press, Mead decided to throw his friend a lifeline.

“I’m sorry to have missed your press conference, Kenneth,” said Mead as he pulled the sheet from his typewriter and tamped it even with a short stack of papers. “But I was finishing a time-sensitive task.”

When Balcomb had settled into the office chair facing his, Mead handed him a manila envelope. “Here’s some reading for your plane ride home. I was going to submit it to
Nature
, but their peer review takes six to eight months, which is much too long to wait, under the circumstances. Or, I should say, under
your
circumstances.”

Balcomb pulled the article out of the envelope and read the title page aloud: “Historical Mass Mortalities of Ziphiids.”

“It’s drawn from a database I’ve been compiling since 1974,” Mead explained. “Something of a pet project of mine. But twenty-five years is long enough to be noodling around with a data set, don’t you think? I’ve decided to publish it in the gray literature, under the Smithsonian letterhead.”

Usually authored by the most respected researchers inside the most prestigious institutions, “gray literature” is published directly by academic institutions or governmental agencies under their own letterhead, rather than being submitted for time-consuming peer review and publication in a journal. When published by the right author at an opportune time, gray literature can play an influential role in shaping policy and influencing scientific opinion.

“I’m thinking that in addition to the usual federal registries, I’ll post it on MARMAM. That’s probably the quickest way to get it into circulation.”

When Balcomb started to scan the article, Mead gently took it back and pressed it inside the envelope. “Save it for your plane ride home,” he said. “Enjoy it with a stiff drink. You look like you could use one.”

As instructed, Balcomb waited until the flight attendant brought him his rum and Coke before pulling Mead’s paper out of the envelope. It was a meta-analysis of the 50 known mass strandings of ziphiids—or, beaked whales—beginning with the first recorded stranding back in 1834 in Norway, all the way through the recent mass stranding in the Bahamas. The study’s primary finding, indented halfway down the first page of the 26-page article, highlighted a striking anomaly in the 166-year data set:

There have been six strandings of ziphiids which involved more than one species . . . In all six events there were naval maneuvers present in the area, and all six took place on islands.

It was a simple-enough observation, and rigorously documented in the pages of charts and citations that followed. But no academic researcher had ever before established a direct historical connection between naval exercises and mass strandings of beaked whales. Since the 1996 Greek stranding, the Navy and its handpicked scientists had dedicated significant resources to disavowing any evidence trail of a causal relationship. Had anyone other than Jim Mead written the article, his findings would have been attacked as inflammatory. But Mead was a singular figure in his field. Everyone knew and respected his work, and, more remarkably in a polarized discipline dominated by eccentrics and iconoclasts, Jim Mead was universally well liked.

•  •  •

One notable mass stranding of beaked whales
didn’t
appear in Mead’s data set—because it occurred the same day as the press conference and hadn’t yet been reported in the media.

On May 9, 2000, NATO naval forces commenced antisubmarine exercises inside the 3,000-meter-deep canyon between the islands of Madeira and Porto Santo, off the coast of Morocco. The joint task force included one aircraft carrier, three submarines, and more than 40 surface vessels, including warships, logistic vessels, and landing craft.

The next day, four beaked whales stranded on the beaches of Madeira. The stranding of individual beaked whales is a rare event in the Madeira archipelago, according to the historical records. A multiple stranding had never been recorded before.

Scientific investigators found that the whales’ injuries, and the pattern of their stranding, suggested that a pressure event similar to the one in the Bahamas had precipitated or contributed to the strandings. As Darlene Ketten later wrote, following the necropsies and CT scans she subsequently performed on the beaked whales that stranded on Madeira:

Several observations on these beaked whales are consistent with the findings on the Bahamian specimens. In particular, blood in and around the eyes, kidney lesions, pleural hemorrhage, lung congestion, and in the one preserved head, subarachnoid and ventricular hemorrhages, were found which are consistent with Bahamian pathologies that are consistent with stress and pressure related trauma. The coincidence of pathology and the stranding patterns in both sites raises the concern that a similar pressure event precipitated or contributed to strandings in both sites.

As Balcomb’s plane cruised southward, high above the Eastern Seaboard, Jim Mead selected “Historical Mass Mortalities of Ziphiids” from the document list on his desktop computer and uploaded it to the Smithsonian mainframe. Then he logged on to MARMAM and posted the article “For General Circulation.”

With those few keystrokes—and with the evidence emerging from the strandings in the Bahamas and Madeira—Mead upgraded the sonar threat to whales from an unsubstantiated rumor to documented science.