War of the Whales (64 page)

They cut the dose in half for the next dolphin, but its blowhole also collapsed, followed by cardiac arrest. Despite efforts to revive him through artificial respiration, the dolphin died. Dolphin number three did slightly better under an even smaller dose, but after it lolled sideways in the pool and displayed clear signs of serious brain damage, the researchers decided to euthanize the animal—a simple task, given their prior attempts at anesthesia. They switched to another anesthetic agent, paraldehyde, but that also proved fatal to dolphins four and five.

6. Joan McIntyre Varawa,
Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974). This collection of essays, poems, scientific discourses, photographs, and drawings became the “whole whale catalogue” of the 1970s, according to author, illustrator, and marine biologist Richard Ellis.

7. Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were conducting the Harvard Psilocybin Project in collaboration with theology students, and their Concord Prison Experiment studied the effect of psilocybin on recidivism rates.

8. Lilly’s “implorations” inside his deprivation tank inspired the 1980 movie
Altered States
, directed by Ken Russell and starring William Hurt as a Harvard researcher who self-experiments using hallucinogens in a flotation tank.

9. As recounted in Lilly’s second book,
The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence
, during ten weeks in 1965, a young female research associate named Margaret Howe cohabited with a male dolphin named Peter. Margaret interacted continuously with Peter, including trying to teach him basic human language. Eventually the dolphin became infatuated with his human companion and began making overt sexual advances—to which she eventually responded.

10. Lilly’s liberation of his dolphins became the template for “dolphin liberation.” The next volley in the battle for dolphin rights had been fired on April 22, 1970, when former Flipper trainer turned dolphin liberationist Ric O’Barry chose the first Earth Day to declare war on captive dolphin research. Shortly after midnight, O’Barry broke into the Lerner Marine Laboratory on the island of Bimini and cut through the wire mesh pen holding a dolphin named Charlie Brown. To O’Barry’s dismay, Charlie Brown refused to leave his pen, and O’Barry was quickly arrested. As the
Miami Herald
’s front-page headline summed it up: “Trainer of Flipper in Flap; Can’t Get Dolphin to Flee.” But O’Barry had served notice that a new front had opened in the dolphin wars.

Chapter 18: The Killer Turned Tame

1. After the Puget Sound orca captures ended in 1976, SeaWorld and its director of collections, Don Goldsberry, moved on to Iceland. Between 1976 and 1989, Iceland proved the best source for SeaWorld and other marine parks wanting to capture or buy new orcas.

2. In 2009, 13 million people took whale-watching tours in 119 countries worldwide, generating ticket fees and tourism expenditures of more than $2.1 billion during 2008. More than 3,000 whale-watching operations around the world now employ an estimated 13,200 people, according to a study commissioned by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). See A. M. Cisneros-Montemayor et al., “The Global Potential for Whale Watching,”
Marine Policy
(2010), doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2010.05.005.

Meanwhile, watching whales in captive settings is also big business. SeaWorld, which owns ten amusement parks in the United States, including five in Florida, was sold to the Blackstone Group for $2.5 billion in 2009. In 2012 SeaWorld had profits of $77 million on total revenues of $1.4 billion. See Jason Garcia, “SeaWorld Entertainment’s Profit Soars on Increases in Revenue, Attendance,”
Orlando Sentinel
, March 26, 2013.

Chapter 20: The Dolphins That Joined the Navy

1. According to documents uncovered at the Lilly archive at Stanford University by Princeton historian D. Graham Burnette, John Lilly was consulting with his former CalTech classmate and director of China Lake, Bill McLean, about deploying dolphins as battle space assets even before Lilly published
Man and Dolphin
. McLean brought Lilly out to NOTS to brief his engineers, and he continued to maintain contact with Lilly as the Navy developed its own marine mammal research facility.

2. Since confirming dolphin echolocation in the 1950s, the Navy had been systematically studying whether other marine mammals and nonmammals possessed parallel abilities. Seals and sea lions, for instance, were suspected of echolocating until exhaustive studies revealed that they could track miniature submarines—and, presumably, fish—from 130 feet away by using their hypersensitive whiskers to follow the wakes left by objects moving through the water.

3. Journalists and authors David Helvarg and Steve Chapple have individually reported interviews with trainers and CIA operatives who claim direct knowledge of dolphin dark ops, including Michael Greenwood, a Navy and CIA dolphin specialists who gave 150 pages of closed-door testimony before the Church Committee Senate hearings into extralegal CIA operations. For more on this, see pages 68–75 of David Helvarg’s
Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness
(Sierra Club Books, 2006).

4. Engineer Whitlow Au and experimental psychologist Paul Nachtigall led the Navy’s Hawaii-based dolphin research program. Whitlow W. L. Au,
The Sonar of Dolphins
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993); Paul E. Nachtigall and Patrick W. B. Moore,
Animal Sonar: Processes and Performance
(New York: Plenum, 1988).

5. In fact, one of the Navy’s Hawaii-based biosonar researchers, an experimental psychologist named Herb Roitblat, translated the neural networks of dolphin colonies into a new kind of internet search engine. He left the Navy, patented his invention, and built a start-up around his algorithm, which he called DolphinSearch.

6. The Soviets’ militarized dolphin program, based in Sevastopol, Crimea, was quickly decommissioned at the end of the Cold War. In 2000 the BBC and other news outlets reported that Russia sold its trained marine mammals to Iran: “In total, 27 animals, including walruses, sea lions, seals, and a white beluga whale, were loaded with the dolphins into a Russian transport aircraft for the journey from Sevastopol, on the Crimean peninsula, in the Black Sea, to the Persian Gulf.” See “Iran Buys Kamikaze Dolphins,” BBC News, March 8, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/670551.stm.

In 2004 Doug Cartlidge, a dolphin expert with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society of London, visited the site of the former Soviet Dolphin Division, the care of which had been transferred to the Ukrainian navy. He reported that the Ukrainians were now in the business of capturing and training dolphins and other marine mammals for sale and export to various Middle Eastern countries. Anecdotal reports suggest that the Soviets’ dolphin program paralleled that of the US Navy, and there are rumored accounts of similarly bizarre programs of kamikaze whales. See: www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?73415-quot-warrior-dolphins-quot.

Chapter 22: The Mermaid That Got Away

1. Kenneth Norris, Balcomb’s mentor at UC Santa Cruz, had a career path that was both unlikely and typical during the early days of the field. A zoologist specializing in desert reptiles, Norris was recruited in 1953 as the founding curator at Marineland of the Pacific, the country’s first West Coast oceanarium. At Marineland, Norris conducted some of the earliest research confirming biosonar in dolphins. In 1964, along with three UCLA fraternity brothers, he co-founded SeaWorld on 22 acres of San Diego’s Mission Bay. He then went on to become the first director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Marine Studies in 1972, a year before Balcomb’s arrival.

2. Marc Kaufman, “Navy Tests Linked to Beaching Of Whales; Ear Bleeding Consistent With Intense Noise,”
Washington Post
, June 15, 2000, A03.

Chapter 23: In the Valley of the Whales

1. 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.

2. US Department of Commerce and US Department of the Navy,
Joint Interim Report: Bahamas Marine Mammal Stranding Event of March 15–16, 2000
(Washington, DC: US Department of Commerce, 2001).

3. According to the Navy and NMFS Interim Report: “The necropsy on the spotted dolphin revealed the animal died with systemic debilitating disease. It was considered unrelated to the mass stranding event cluster.”

4. M. P. Johnson and P. L. Tyack, “A Digital Acoustic Recording Tag for Measuring the Response of Wild Marine Mammals to Sound,”
IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering
28, no. 1 (January 2003): 3–12.

Chapter 24: God and Country v. the Whales

1. The Humane Society of the United States, the League for Coastal Protection, and the Ocean Futures Society.

Chapter 25: “It Is So Ordered”

1. The two Department of Justice attorneys representing the Navy in the Low Frequency Active sonar case were Ann Navarro and Kristen Gustafson.

2. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero served as mediator in the Northern District’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Program.

3. Correspondence between Marine Mammal Research Program officer, Office of Naval Research, and operations manager for Navy sonar system, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (August 6–9, 2001); document AR24279 addendum in the administrative record filed in
NRDC v. Evans
(N.D. Cal. 2003), on file with NRDC.

Here, with names and other identifying information omitted, is the complete dialogue:

Operations Official (  forwarding public comments that the researchers had submitted to NMFS):
[
ONR official
]
, is the Navy funding any
[
of these scientists’
]
research? Did they say anything to you on this issue?

Operations Official:
[
ONR official
]
, their comments were in the attachment. Yes, they were negative and, in my opinion, out of the box. If they are funded by the Navy, the proper way to bitch is via the sponsor
[
you
]
, and not a letter to NMFS. All of the data cited was run by your office, we are not perfect and
[
Marine Acoustics, the Navy’s contractor
]
has always tried to spin data, but I’ve tried to be objective. A letter from
[
these researchers
]
to NMFS is nothing more than an attempt to discredit the Navy and stop the deployment of LFA. Maybe I’m missing the big picture—what say you?

ONR Official: I told them as much in a pretty scorching phone call. I think they had some inkling that they might be about to take our money and make themselves look good to the enviros, too, but I can’t prove that. The main driver was
[
an environmental group
]
. All through this process,
[
the researchers
]
had ignored the LFA issue, not responded to requests for comments, in the Federal Register, etc. Then one day
[
an environmentalist
]
calls them and asks them if they had read the EIS.
[
The lead researcher
]
said, “No,” and
[
the environmentalist
]
said, “I’ll mail you a copy, and please send your comments to
[
NMFS
]
right away.” Scientists are like that; they’ll review anything they’re asked to review and give their honest, sometimes harsh critique, without knowing any of the politics or circumstances. It’s the way you do things in peer review of a colleague’s paper, and they just apply the process to everything they read. If we had asked them to review it earlier, we probably could have absorbed his criticism
[
on this particular issue
]
and thus defused any further criticism, but that’s water under the bridge now. I also reminded
[
the lead researcher
]
that he was using data that he published after the EIS was written, and data that was not yet published; and I told him it was unfair to expect Navy to use information that he had not provided at the time the EIS was written. I got a sheepish apology for his not providing input earlier (even though we had not asked him directly for it), and for holding the EIS to his changing understanding of the problem as his research has progressed. But I don’t know what good that does us.

Chapter 26: Counterattack

1. Marc Kaufman, “Whale Stranding in N.C. Followed Navy Sonar Use,”
Washington Post
, January 28, 2005, A03.

2. Brian Kelly and Lukas Velush, “Report on Porpoise Deaths Splits Navy, Whale Groups,”
Herald
(of Everett, Washington), February 10, 2004, www.heraldnet.com/article/20040210/NEWS01/402100704.

3. 
Assessment of Acoustic Exposures on Marine Mammals in Conjunction with USS
Shoup
Active Sonar Transmissions in the Eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca and Haro Strait
, Washington, May 5, 2003 (Silver Spring, MD: National Marine Fisheries Service, January 2005).

4. Hert Levine et al.,
Active Sonar Waveform
(McLean, VA: JASON, the Mitre Corporation, June 2004), 1 (JSR-03-200).

Chapter 27: The Admirals Take Charge

1. The Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC), the world’s largest international naval warfare exercise, is held biennially during June and July in Honolulu. It is hosted by the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet, which invites allied military forces from the Pacific Rim nations to participate.

2. The RIMPAC lawsuit was brought by NRDC in conjunction with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Cetacean Society International, and the Ocean Futures Society, as well as OFS founder and director Jean-Michel Cousteau.