War of the Whales (4 page)

Earthwatch team and neighbors with a second stranded Cuvier’s beaked whale at Rocky Point, March 15, 2000.

Balcomb threw Claridge a look that she recognized as “You’re the den mother here. I’m the guy who keeps the boats running.” But she had more pressing business to tend to. She crouched low to examine the coral cuts on the whale’s belly, which were starting to congeal and clot. A promising sign, unless it meant he was dehydrating. At least his eyes were still clear. She collected a skin-scrape sample and peeled back a towel to study the scarring on his flank. “Zc-12,” she said as Balcomb photographed the dorsal fin from both sides.

The kayaks arrived, and Balcomb motioned to them to stop offshore on the far side of the shark swirl. Now Claridge took charge of the Earthlings. “Who knows how to shoot video?” she called. One of the younger women raised her hand. “Okay, get the camera from the truck and run tape, with time-code stamp. And stay out of the water when you’re shooting. You four, lose that canopy and help me with this tarp. The rest of you gather some pieces of driftwood up there,” she said, pointing toward a nearby house. “Something you can swing like a bat.”

Claridge peeled back the wet towels and sheets with the tenderness of a mother removing a child’s Band-Aid. She examined the animal for other wounds, but found none. Then she unrolled the large blue tarp. She and Balcomb and Ellifrit drew the edge of the tarp underneath the whale’s head. As the Earthlings rocked the whale from side to side, they worked the tarp up under his trunk.

Ellifrit handed out driftwood clubs to three of the bravest-looking souls and hefted one himself. “Beat the water in front of the whale as we move him out,” Balcomb directed them. “Dave will show you how. Fan out in a semicircle. The sharks aren’t interested in you, unless your feet are bleeding, so check them now for cuts, and watch out for the coral.”

Ellifrit led the three Earthlings out into the water, thrashing the surface as hard as they could and shouting as they went. Claridge and Balcomb, alongside four more Earthlings, grabbed hold of the blue tarp.

“Now lift and drag,” Claridge commanded. “Just a few feet at a time.” The tarp made a nasty tearing sound against the coral. “I said
lift
!”

In a moment, they were off the ledge and half hauling, half floating the whale through the shallows. The kayakers beat their paddles in the water to disrupt the sharks, which scattered, then quickly regrouped. The sharks maintained a constant distance, circling and darting in feints toward the whale, but eventually giving way in front of the V formation of wildly thrashing beaters. The kayaks fell in beside the tarp bearers, creating a floating barrier between the sharks and the whale.

When they pulled the tarp out from under the whale, he listed slowly to the left. Balcomb and Claridge propped him up on opposite sides, as if he were a drunken sailor.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Seems kind of wobbly,” he said. “But he’s not bleeding. Anyway, we’re out of time.”

“Right. Let’s give him a go, then.”

They eased him ahead into open water. The whale hung in the water, not moving forward, but not listing to the side, either. Ellifrit ran over and gave him a final shove from behind. “Get outahere!”

The whale moved his fluke weakly up and down, ducked his head, and dove. Balcomb held his breath as he watched him fluking away in the direction of the canyon. It occurred to him that he’ d never seen a beaked whale swim in the shallows, until today. Was that a normal fluking action? Was he actually heading back to the canyon, or was he simply swimming away from the commotion of sharks and humans?

He waited and watched. Nothing. Nothing was good.

Claridge tugged at his T-shirt. “Let’s get out of the water,” she said.

They didn’t talk on the short drive back to the house. It was past 1:00 p.m., and Claridge was fielding calls on the truck’s VHF radio. Reports were still coming in of other strandings on nearby cays. Two whales, probably minkes, had stranded alive near Royal Island, 25 miles to the southeast. A beaked whale mother and calf had come ashore two hours ago on a small cay near Grand Bahama, 60 miles northwest of their house. The calf was already dead. It was unprecedented—and unexplainable.

Balcomb knew it was time to make a call.

* More than 25 percent of the 78 whale species are beaked whales, though only a few species of beaked whales have been well studied.

2

Castaways

Back in the house at Sandy Point, Balcomb rifled his desk drawers for Bob Gisiner’s business card. He distinctly remembered Gisiner handing him his Office of Naval Research card at the Society for Marine Mammalogy conference in Maui, Hawaii, back in December. Balcomb had thrown it into some drawer along with all the other cards he collected that week. Now where was it?

Balcomb wasn’t used to reaching out for help. He always fixed his own cars and boats when they broke. Money was chronically tight, but he managed to keep his boats gassed up and in the water. A couple of wealthy donors had helped along the way with the gift of a survey boat and a down payment loan on his house, which doubled as the research headquarters back in Smugglers Cove, Washington. Otherwise he was proudly, stubbornly self-sufficient, and over the years, he’ d managed to scrape together what he needed to continue his research.

But now he needed help, and he knew it. The elation he’ d first felt on seeing and touching a live Cuvier’s had given way to dismay at the multiple strandings, then to anxiety that something catastrophic had befallen the whales they’ d been studying for the past decade. What could have happened out there to send them streaming out of the canyon and into the dangerous shallows? He tried to clear his head of exhaustion and confusion, so he could sort it out. Something extraordinary had happened in the canyon that morning. Of that much he was certain.

He’ d heard that Disney Cruise Line had been dynamiting offshore of Castaway Cay as part of a new pier construction. But that was 15 miles from Sandy Point. An undersea earthquake, or some other seismic event, could produce intense pressure waves that could drive whales ashore. But that would have also created unusually high surf, and he hadn’t seen the kind of driftwood or debris that would have washed ashore after a tidal storm.

His thoughts kept circling back to the US Navy, which maintained an underwater testing range 100 miles to the southeast, off Andros Island. If the Navy had something going on anywhere near Abaco, Bob Gisiner would know about it. Or he could call someone who would know. In the meantime, Gisiner had the resources to jump-start an investigation here on the ground. There was no way Balcomb and his team could manage forensics on a multispecies mass stranding. He didn’t have the manpower or the labs. And he sure didn’t have the money.

Gisiner had been Balcomb’s graduate school classmate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, back in the early 1970s. In those days, UC Santa Cruz was the leading—really, the only—university offering a marine mammal program. Marine mammalogy had barely been named, much less codified, and the prior generation of pioneering researchers had emerged from disciplines as disparate as neurology, marine biology veterinary medicine, zoology and ichthyology. The graduate program was tiny, and the students who collaborated on field research along the California coast worked at such close quarters that no one had any secrets. By the end of the semester, they knew one another the way a submariner knows his bunkmate: by smell. That first generation of university-trained marine mammal scientists remained a tight-knit, mostly male fraternity for decades afterward, even if they were conducting research on opposite ends of the globe and only crossed paths at annual conferences.

Balcomb and Gisiner hadn’t been close friends at Santa Cruz. Gisiner studied seals and sea lions—the “pinniped” branch of the marine mammal family tree—while Balcomb was focused exclusively on whales. With his droopy mustache and wizened eyes, Gisiner had eventually come to resemble his research subjects, in much the way some dog owners seem to morph into their pet’s particular breed. Gisiner was smart, like everyone else in the PhD program. But he’ d also been ambitious and shrewd in a way that made him stand out among the laid-back California students of the day.

After grad school, Balcomb’s and Gisiner’s careers went in opposite directions. Balcomb left Santa Cruz for Japan, where he studied the local Baird’s beaked whales. Then he moved to the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest to begin a photo census of the resident killer-whale population that he continued every summer for decades. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he subsisted on donations from local donors and grants from small foundations, plus the trickle of money he netted from hosting the Earthwatch program. Balcomb didn’t publish very often in the peer-reviewed journals, and when he did, he was always happy to give first-author credit to his collaborators. His highest-profile publication had been the Baird’s beaked whale chapter in the
Handbook of Marine Mammals
. Balcomb was proud to be included among the PhDs and career academic contributors to that multivolume textbook. But unlike most of his classmates from Santa Cruz, Balcomb never established any institutional affiliation. And because he didn’t complete his PhD coursework, the plum jobs inside academia, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the Office of Naval Research remained out of Balcomb’s reach. Not that he could ever have navigated the institutional politics that seemed like Gisiner’s natural habitat. Truth be told, Balcomb couldn’t bear to be indoors for long, much less work at a desk or sit in meetings.

Gisiner had always been more of an organization man. With so few university-based marine mammal programs nationwide, he didn’t see much of a future in academics. So he went to work for the Navy as a civilian researcher—first training pigeons to locate downed pilots in the Pacific Ocean, and then working with seals in Hawaii and with pilot whales and dolphins at the Navy’s marine mammal training and research center in San Diego. Gisiner’s big promotion came in the midnineties when he was transferred to Washington, DC, to run the marine mammal division at the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

ONR is the Navy’s great hall of academe. When most people think of the Navy, they conjure images of battleships, aircraft carriers, and submarines. But the combat arm of the Navy—the operating fleet of ships, submarines, and planes—is simply one branch of a massive organizational tree whose roots traverse the uniform and civilian worlds. One of the biggest civilian-staffed branches of the Navy is the Office of Naval Research, a billion-dollar agency spread over naval labs and academic research centers across the country and around the globe.

The Navy took pride in having been the first of the armed services to establish a world-class research program. By the time World War II ended, it had become clear that knowledge of the oceans was the key to dominating the high seas. US naval strategists understood that the Soviet Union would soon be vying for control of the borderless oceans, and that antisubmarine warfare would become the most critical battle space of the Cold War. To compete in the underwater arena, they embarked on an intensive campaign to recruit the best and brightest marine scientists to the Cold War effort. In 1946 President Harry Truman established ONR to coordinate the nation’s investment in underwater research. Flush with Navy money, small oceanographic institutes such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts metamorphosed from sleepy academic centers into well-funded research labs.

During the second half of the twentieth century, ONR became the world’s leading funder of oceanographic research, as well as a college catalogue of other scientific disciplines including meteorology, medicine, aeronautics, communications, logistics, engineering, satellite surveillance, nuclear propulsion, ballistics, hydrodynamics, sonar, acoustics, and marine mammal biology—the last being Gisiner’s niche. The Navy had been active in marine mammal research for decades, but during Gisiner’s tenure ONR’s budget in this area tripled. By 2000, he had become the funding czar for marine mammal researchers from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and every latitude in between.

Somehow Balcomb never found himself downstream from any of ONR’s grants. Not even in the past few years, when ONR felt obliged to fund beaked whale research following a 1996 mass stranding of beaked whales in Greece during NATO naval exercises. When they ran into each other at the recent marine mammal conference in Hawaii, Gisiner gave Balcomb his card, and they agreed to stay in closer touch.

Balcomb finally found the card paper-clipped inside the conference program guide. When Gisiner picked up after the first ring, Balcomb didn’t pause for pleasantries. “Bob, this is Ken Balcomb. On Abaco Island. I’m standing in the middle of a mass stranding down here. Two, probably three or more species.”