In requesting permission to open this area up to environmental compromise, the Navy is also requires a “Letter of Authorization” (LOA) from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) “to take or harass marine mammals.”

The Navy’s LOA request was also a very wordy document – some 426 pages and reading a bit like a marine natural history textbook. Although all of these words were wrapped around a scant ten day transect survey of the proposed 42,000 sq. mile area.  We found this shortcoming exacerbated by the fact that the transects were performed in April to derive estimates marine mammal populations throughout the summer feeding season when they want to do their exercises.

The EPA among others also found the population estimates inadequate so I suspect the Navy will be asked to do a more thorough survey job. But in our comments we also found quite a few more deficiencies in the impact estimates – statistical anomalies and carefully selected (but outdated) research papers used to substantiate their models, for example.

Another troubling symptom of their request is that they mention nothing about the dumping of 10,000 lbs. of toxins each year into the GOA – toxins which are persistent, are known endocrine disrupters, and are increasingly found in high concentrations in the tissues of marine mammals.

Our comments on the GOA Letter of Authorization Request are not particularly light reading, but we believe that they call for much more than just a recalibration of marine mammal population estimates to induce a “green light” from NMFS.

Back in the mid 1970’s Physical Oceanographer Walter Munk was evaluating the acoustical transmission characteristics of the ocean “sound channel” – an isothermal layer in the deep ocean that baleen whales use for long distance communication.

His visionary work in this field developed into a 1991 experiment called the “Heard Island Feasibility Test” which produced the first sound that was literally heard around the world – under water.

The utility of this ocean feature for long distance communication was something Dr. Munk had been advancing ever since 1978 when he proposed a “Sea Net” – an acoustic based ocean internet system that could be used – and heard around the world.

It was along this trajectory that the “Acoustic Thermography of Ocean Climates” (ATOC) was proposed, and then deployed in 1992 despite the misgivings many of us had about projecting very loud sounds throughout the entire Pacific Basin.

ATOC turned out to be relatively benign, but for me it was the harbinger of things to come; where all manner of acoustic signals would be used for research, military, and industrial communication –crowding out the important bio-acoustic signals of marine animals.

The signals and technologies continued to develop, and it was in 2000 with a US Navy proposal of a long distance sonar system called “SURTASS” (which would ensonify the entire ocean with military noise) that the public became aware of the problem.

Public hearings were conducted, lawsuits filed, and demonstrations ensued. It was in the midst of this gambit that the Bahamas Stranding occurred – alerting us all that despite the assurances of our Navy that there was indeed a problem.

It is the continuous association between military operations and marine mammal strandings that has kept the Ocean Noise Pollution issue in the public conversation. While most of this conversation orbits around military sonar and seismic surveys, the exponential advance of other acoustical communication and navigation signals threatens to seriously compromise the marine bio-acoustic habitat.

This link describes one such signal, but there are many others being developed and deployed for research, industrial, and military applications.

While some of these signals may not be pernicious – even while overlapping some odontocete communication and bio-sonar bands, it would be good to know this prior to saturating biologically significant habitat with sounds generated by expensive equipment.

Tools to make this determination is one of OCR’s banner projects which we hope to complete this year pending support from funding agencies.

When we do complete these tools it will be none too soon, as underwater communication systems are springing up like mushrooms all over the sea.

Stay tuned!

Photo: Paul Nicklen, National Geographic

An November 2009 article in Nature looks at non-kin cooperation models in animal societies. It examines reciprocity, mutualism, and manipulation in economic terms – with future expectations, biological expense, and cheating included in some of the trade values.

The overarching perspective is “why would an animal incur costs to their survival fitness unless there was some clear selection benefit to their behavior?”

Couching animal and human behavior strictly in economic terms has been an increasing trend over the last few decades. And while it does reveal expected value-exchange patterns and allows for repeatable assessments of behavioral incentives, it is a fairly narrow framework that comes at a pretty high “cost” – to extend the metaphor.

For example; it is this reductionist framing that justifies destruction of habitat because the economic value of the “extracted resources” outweighs the “environmental services” provided by the habitat.

Looking at biological systems as “economies” can suck the air out of environmental preservation discussions. I believe it also misses a fundamental reason for being alive.

Two compelling stories came up this month that illustrate this point; stories that would not fit well into the bio-economic models.

In one story a National Geographic photographer jumps into the water to film a leopard seal – a large deadly predator that is known to attack and eat humans. It turned out that the leopard seal “took pity” on this skin-and-bones visitor and spent the next few days capturing penguins and trying to feed him. In the second story a Humpback whale saves a Weddell seal from hungry Orcas with no clear biological incentives or expectations of reward.

Both of these examples of inter-species cooperation could be explained as “misdirected mothering instincts” – an explanation that is sort of a “work-around” when the economic model doesn’t fit very well.

Or it could be looked at as acts of gratitude: If you have something good going for you, it just feels nice to share it.

I hope that this finds you with lots to be thankful for, and abundant opportunities to share it with others.

Happy Thanksgiving!

photo: Brain Skerry

A nicely written article in the Dec. 3 2009 issue  Nature reveals how a how a neutrino detection experiment conducted in the Mediterranean Sea by nuclear physicists actually uncovered an abundance of sperm whales.

The experiment involved placing hydrophones down 2000 meters below the surface; the idea being that these hydrophones could detect little pops from neutrinos – sub-atomic particles zipping in from deep space.

Marine Biologists Giovanni Pavan was brought in to help filter out the background noise. What they found though was a proliferation of biological sounds, and a surprising high density of Sperm Whale vocalizations – which ended up shifting the focus of the study to monitoring populations of sperm whales.

The article mentions that the Nuclear Physicists somehow thought that the deep ocean would be a “quiet test chamber” for their studies. I find it telling that some of the smartest guys in the room (nuclear physicists) would be so siloed in their field that they would lose track of the fact that the ocean is teaming with ‘biologicals.’

This speaks volumes about our education model that focuses on specialization. It makes me worry about what I am missing when I scan the field I inhabit. But this tale also helps me cultivate more patience for those folks who “can not seem to grasp” the importance of our mission of preserving the ocean’s bio-acoustic sanctity.

This little sound sample is of the “carpenter fish” – an old mariner’s name for sperm whales, representative of what the scientists heard.

Pisces Launch (NOAA photo)

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries department has launched a third in a series of four fisheries research vessels designed around new, quiet technologies.

Named “Pisces” NOAA’s Rear Adm. Jonathan Bailey says that the boat “…is so advanced and quiet that it is likely fish and other marine animals will never know it’s there. And that’s the whole idea.”

At the launch, NOAA Director and environmental hero Dr. Jane Lubchenko revealed “I know firsthand that the ocean does not always give up her secrets willingly.”

Ship-quieting technologies and guidelines have really taken a hold of ship-building strategies. Just this year the International Maritime Organization (IMO) began drawing up guidelines for quieter vessels, which will have a positive impact on the overall noise-floor of the ocean.

It is nice to see institutional willingness to face and address an important aspect of ocean noise pollution. Solutions are forthcoming. If only the Military and the Fossil Fuel industries would be so willing…

EcoJustice is asking for hearings about a proposed geological survey of the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents Marine Protected Area. There is some irony in conducting seismic surveys in marine protected areas, particularly an area that has been recognized as a habitat for “12 species of marine life that do not exist anywhere else.”

Sabine Jessen from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society pointedly comments “If marine animals can’t find safety in the few areas set aside for them, where will they find it?”

The article from the Canadian Times Colonists was sent to us by a colleague at NSF and can be found here.

Perhaps as informative about the issue are the comments by the mostly Canadian citizens following the article. Equal parts bluster and concern, it illustrates the need for more public understanding about the impacts of seismic surveys on marine life.

There seems to be a divide between those who believe that there is no evidence that seismic surveys harm marine animals, and those who may not have the evidence but instinctively believe that repetitive seismic impulses are inherently bad for marine life.

Many comments are in the tradition of ad-homonym attacks (which I find surprising for Canadians). The comments also do not consider the new data substantiating that seismic surveys do have biological impacts on marine mammal foraging behavior at distances greater than 10 km (Jochens, et al, 2008, Southall et. al. 2007), and have been correlated with a cessation in traditional migratory behavior at distances greater than 100km in Mediterranean Sei whales (Castellote, 2009). And of course there is the well established evidence that seismic surveys compromise fisheries.

This particular scrap is a little uncommon because the antagonists are scientists, not the usual fossil fuel industries or the military. It also illustrates the priority rift between geophysical sciences and biological sciences – and the inherent problem with scientific specialization.

The geophysicists want to know more about tectonics in this lively area full of hydrothermal vents. The area is host to unique species, perhaps because of the hydrothermal activity. Should we compromise the unique life here to find out about its tectonic structure? Or should we take a broader and longer view of the area as a unique global habitat?

Of course all of the scientific data is “important,” but if it is not considered in a larger systematic context it loses relevance.

Follow-up on the Dust-up:

Director of Acoustic Ecology Jim Cummings reviewed this issue in greater depth and reports that the survey ship did go through an Environmental Assessment with National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) which concluded that the potential impacts of the project have been well considered.

For me his most persuasive statement Is “Throwing up legal roadblocks to a carefully designed, ten-day seismic shoot is a very extreme reaction, and should be reserved for times and places where there is real danger of harm.”

A similar situation occurred a few years back when Peter Tyack and Peter Stern were attempting to conduct “controlled exposure experiments” on migrating grey whales in California.

In this case the “defense” team took issue with a calibration beacon that sent out a single-frequency signal that would hardly be detectable over the noise of the research vessel engines.

This case drove a wedge between the scientific community and the conservation community that took years to heal, and compromised the acquisition of information that would prove very useful for more important conservation efforts.

Perhaps EcoJustice is taking advantage of the irony of doing seismic testing in a marine protected area.

As in the case of scientific data, any legal precedent is “important,” but if it is not considered in a larger systematic context it loses relevance.

Jim’s article can be found here.

As is typical with these tragic events, the US Navy rolled up their collective sleeves and focused on how to establish that they were not responsible.

In this case they started out with the claim that the exercises were not in progress until after the event. They also sponsored an extensive modeling of the event and presented the findings at the Fall 2004 Acoustics Society meeting. (“Analysis of melon-headed whale aggregation in Hanalei Bay,” David Fromm et. al JASA 2004)

While Dr. Fromm’s presentation was interesting, it was also fraught with data gaps – such as an analysis of the frequencies and signal types used in the exercises. The study was also reiterated their claim that the “embayment” happened before the Navy commenced the exercise (which was later in the day than the stranding.).

A critical element that was omitted from the study was that the warships were calibrating their sonar prior to commencing the exercises. These calibrations were coincident to the embayment of the whales.

There were a number of other troubling  assumptions that did not square with the incident – including a “lunar” connection (based on an aggregation of melon headed whales that occurred on the same day in Japan). All tolled, it was a well funded, beautifully presented model based on exculpating assumptions – and ultimately signifying very little. The paper has not been published after peer review, and remains in abstract form in the J. Acoustical Society of America.

Hallway comments from closely linked (Office of Naval Research- ONR) sponsored scientists seemed to agree that the modeling was an expensive “CYA” presentation (their words).   Your tax dollars at work…

Noise impacts from military communication sonars are much more widespread than the US Navy would like to admit. ONR is funding research on the impacts,  but their priorities seem more focused on how to prevent these embarrassing stranding events from occurring – such as spatial-temporal planning and “recoverable threshold” testing on marine mammals – rather than  determining what the mechanism is for the aggravation.

We believe that the Navy could accomplish their mission safely if they chose to examine the signal characteristics that are agonistic and then crafted communication signals that are more benign.

Toward this end we are working on a metrics system that can qualify noise by loudness as well as “roughness” – the characteristic that distinguishes the differences between alarming sounds and pleasant sounds that may be equally loud. Hopefully this ‘metric’ will provide design guidance in the tempering of mid-frequency communication sonar signals.

The referring articleis  in AAAS Science with a nice title “Whale Stranding: Sonar or Lunar”

Infamous USS Shoup incedent

“The July 13 Federal Register reported that the Navy wants NMFS to permit up to 14 dead marine mammals from its proposed sonar use up to 250 miles from the Northwest coast…”

In ongoing discussions about defining the Pacific Northwest warfare training ground, NMFS is being asked to weigh in on sonar guidelines.

The entire plan has been getting a lot of public attention this last year because it apparently includes provisions to lob missiles over Seattle and other coastal cities into eastern Washington. (…and who wants to be living in a missile firing range?)

The regional sensitivity around the Mid-frequency sonar derives from a nasty affair in Washington’s Haro Straits involving the Navy Destroyer USS Shoup molesting the Puget Sound J-pod orcas and probably killing some 11 harbor porpoises in the area.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer article is pretty candid about the nature of the threats and risks, but the high take levels requested in the Federal Register are a bit stunning. I have not read the actual Request for Incidental Take Permit, so I don’t know how they came up with “14 dead.”  Perhaps it was taking the eleven dead from the Haro Strait incident and tossing in a few more for good measure…

I am also not a military strategist so I can’t comment with any authority about the Navy’s perceived threats. But I would suspect that there is a degree of institutional momentum here that could be combed through much as Congress did on the recent F-22 debacle (dog-fighter airplanes designed around the cold war threat of MIG-25’s).

I believe we have the responsibility to step back a few steps and do a risk/benefits analysis on the entire program being proposed. We might find that just like the F-22 fighter jets, we don’t really need to “incidentally” kill marine mammals to secure our coasts and military assets.

The public comment period on the draft plan will be out in the fall. More words to come.

Ric was the dolphin trainer who selected and trained the dolphins of the 60’s TV series “Flipper” – which began the American love affair with these sentient and intelligent animals.

The consequences of this national love affair included a rapid rise of dolphin parks and water shows throughout the world – a fact that troubled Mr. O’Barry so much that he has since dedicated his life to reversing this practice – now working for Earth Island’s Marine Mammal Project.

The dolphins in these parks come from many places throughout the world, but perhaps the most disturbing pedigree are the dolphins that are selected from  the victims of the Taiji drive fishery.

Each year some 20,000 dolphins are herded, slaughtered and butchered in Taiji, Japan – except for the few “unblemished” and photogenic specimens that are selected by dolphin “trainers” and sent to parks around the world.

The dolphins that don’t make this ‘cut’ make the death cut and are sold into the Japanese markets falsely labeled as “whale meat.” (People are getting wise to the extreme mercury load of dolphin meat.)

The dolphins are driven into the cove by noise – the fishermen hammer on metal pipes with resonators submersed into the water. The noise is obnoxious enough to drive the dolphins into the cove to escape. Nets are then drawn across the cove and the grisly affair begins.

While the movie is grim, the filmmakers have spared us the most gruesome shots; and if dolphin slaughter can be sensitively displayed, they have done the best that could be done.

“The Cove” is an eco-thriller that will hopefully stop this gruesome fishery in its tracks – and perhaps be the first of a genre of movies wherein environmental activists are honored for their heroism, rather than ridiculed for their zeal.

“The Cove” opens this week in NY and LA and in other major US cities next Friday

See: http://thecovemovie.com/festivals/upcoming_screenings.htm for locations near you.

The Touch

San Ignacio Lagoon is the birthplace of a remarkable chapter in the relationship between whales and humans. The lagoons along the western coast of the American Continent- from San Francisco Bay in the north to Bahía Magdalena in the south – were all once breeding and birthing areas for the Eastern Pacific Gray Whales.

Shipping activities, harbor construction, oil extraction and processing and other human enterprises chased the whales out of many of their historic haunts (such as San Francisco and San Diego bays). Currently the only remaining breeding and birthing lagoons are the lagoons of Baja California – Guerrero Negro, San Ignacio, and Bahía Magdalena.

Of course decades of commercial whaling also played into this decimation of safe habitat and almost put the gray whales out of business. It was in fact these very lagoons where  some of the most voracious whaling occurred; whalers would go into the lagoons, attack the vulnerable baby whales and then capture and kill the mothers when they came to rescue their babies. This was a dangerous game for the whalers because unlike many baleen whales, the Gray Whale will attack their aggressors. One out of four whalers in the gray whale industry was either killed or maimed in these encounters – crowning the gray whale with the ominous name of “devilfish.”

Nonetheless the whaler’s strategies were so effective that by 1946 there were only a few thousand remaining whales, and commercial exploitation of the stock was no longer viable (and thus banned by the International Whaling Commission).

It was in San Ignacio Lagoon that this bloody history turned a page. In 1972, Pachico Mayoral, a fisherman in the Ejido of San Ignacio was out in his panga when a gray whale approached and began bumping and contacting the panga. Knowing the history and the dangerous behavior of these devilfish, Pachico was terrified. It seems that the devilfish tormented Pachico for hours; bumping and lifting his boat, scratching her belly on the hull, and peering over the gunwales into the boat.

It was during one of these “peering” maneuvers that Pachico gathered his courage and reached out to touch the beast. He says he felt “safe,” – that he realized that the whale ment him no harm.

When he finally returned home his family and community did not believe him. It took a few more encounters for the people to understand that within the whale’s living memory of the slaughter, these animals were forging a different relationship with the humans.

This relationship has blossomed into what is one of the most successful interspecies environmental businesses ever:  every year thousands of eco-tourists head down to the lagoons of Baja to meet the “friendly whales.”

I have been taking small groups to the lagoons over the years on what is almost a pilgrimage for some; to meet and interact with the baby whales and their mothers. These journeys are always transformative, and also just plain delightful.

We have been to both Bahía Magdalena and Laguna San Ignacio, though I have preferred the later because the bumpy dirt road across the desert has discouraged the concentrations of tourists you find in Magdalena. This lends to a more intimate experience in San Ignacio.

This will soon be changing though, because the highway department has begun construction of a paved road from the nearest town of San Ignacio to traverse the 60 km to the lagoon, and then head south to connect with the paved road at La Purisima.

The paved road will be a significant asset to the residents of the lagoon, improving access to commerce and tourism. The road will also significantly improve access to medical services for the residents of the lagoon. This road will change the relationship between the humans and the whales – and the human experience of the whale encounters – by dint of the fact that once the road is complete you can just blow out for an afternoon encounter and be back in town by evening.

Once the road connects to La Purisima, it will also become a preferred route for automotive and cargo traffic running north and south between the U.S. Mexico border and Cabo San Lucas because it bypasses the current, and fairly treacherous M-1 that runs between San Ignacio and Loreto.

This raises my concern that once the paved road becomes a main thoroughfare for heavy traffic, that seismic scale vibrations from the road will transfer low frequency noise into the lagoon and potentially compromise the habitat for the Gray whales.

In order to address this concern Ocean Conservation Research has put together a program determine the potential acoustical impacts of the road, measuring low frequency acoustical transmission characteristics of the lagoon/land interface where the road will flank the lagoon.

As with any non-profit we are spending more time gathering funds than doing the actual work. As of July 2009 we’re still shy of the complete budget, but research partner Aaron Thode has placed some hydrophones in the test area to get some benchmarks.

For a more detailed account of the project, see: San Ignacio Lagoon Freeway. Of course if you would like to support this project or participate, just contact me through info@OCR.org