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TechnoratiLast week, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper rejected President Bush's attempt to exempt the U.S. Navy from laws protecting endangered whales. The judge noted that President Bush's order was constitutionally suspect, leaving her injunction against sonic blasts in place. Such underwater bursts put whales and other marine mammals at risk. They are also part of a long relationship between whales and human warfare.
For much of the 20th century, the typical lab of a whale biologist was about 20 feet above the open sea. On the flensing deck of factory whaling ships, cetologists examined blubber thickness, stomach contents, gonads and earwax layers. They learned a lot about dead whales: What they had eaten and when they had become sexually mature. The layers of wax provided an indication of age.
World War II interrupted these studies and the business of whaling. German whale chasers were employed instead to hunt Allied submarines, and Japanese whaling ships transported miniature submarines across the Pacific to attack Pearl Harbor. The suspension of the hunt likely saved many whales in the Southern Hemisphere, at least for a while. Yet the extensive use of depth charges and bombs in the north probably killed thousands of cetaceans.
It wasn't until after the war that biologists probed the ocean and began to listen to the whales themselves. The acoustician William Schevill made the first recordings of cetaceans in the wild in the 1950s, going on to describe the calls of more than 30 marine mammal species, including sperm whales, blue whales, dolphins and seals. Schevill's knowledge of these underwater sounds was so extensive that he helped defuse a tense moment between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Low-frequency blips had been detected in the oceans, and the American military suspected that the Soviets were using these sounds to locate U.S. submarines. Schevill and colleagues found the source: fin whales produce trains of blips for about 15 minutes, followed by a two- or three-minute pause when they surface to breathe.
As it turned out, these sounds were being used for detection, but fin whales weren't considered a national threat. (This didn't stop the military from using whales as target practice at the time.) Often feeding where the light of the sun is reduced to that of starlight, whales use sound to locate prey. Whales also rumble, grunt, gurgle and sing - using their voices to attract mates, stay in touch with their offspring, and navigate the shelves, seamounts and islands in the ocean.
This dependency on sound makes whales vulnerable to the rising level of noise in the ocean. The number of cargo ships has tripled in the past 75 years, with bigger ships plying the seas each year. Bio-acoustician Chris Clark describes these chronic sounds as a "smog of human-generated acoustic noise." The constant buzz, which can impact whales' ability to hunt and reproduce, is punctuated by intense pulses from seismic air guns, used to map petroleum deposits on the shelf. These pulses, some of the loudest sounds produced by humans, reach across oceans and may be responsible for the stranding of whales in Mexico. The United States is right to protest commercial whale hunts that violate the suspension of whaling, but we should also protect the soundscape where the world's largest mammals reside.
Naval exercises using midfrequency sonar for antisubmarine training harm whales. There is evidence that gas-bubble disease in whales - the bends - is associated with sonic exposure. Mass strandings of beaked whales have occurred around the world after military tests. In 2000, 14 beaked whales and two minkes stranded in the Bahamas after the U.S. Navy deployed midfrequency sonar. In the lab, cetaceans avoid noise and increase breathing rates, a sign of stress. In the modern ocean, there may be nowhere for dolphins and whales to go.
Biologists are now calling on governments to reduce ocean noise and limit damage from military maneuvers. Judge Cooper's injunction came after the Navy rejected regulations proposed by the California Coastal Commission. The Navy now shuts down sonar exercises if marine mammals or sea turtles are seen in the immediate area, but it continues to reject other commonsense measures. State regulators had approved naval exercises if the military avoided important cetacean habitats, worked in daylight when whales could be spotted, and expanded the safety zone between sonar and whales. Until such steps are taken, naval tests put ocean life at risk.
Joe Roman is a visiting fellow at the University of Vermont and author of "Whale" (Reaktion, 2006).
© 2008 San Francisco Chronicle
14 Comments so far
Show AllBut, Mr Roman, if we take whales into consideration as far as this sonar thing goes, we'll be putting the Navy out of business completely, just like if some of us become vegetarians we'll be putting ranchers out of business completely. Can you say "slippery slope?"
Don't tell me you care more about a bunch of stupid whales than you do about the US military?
Gee, this sarcasm stuff is easy. No wonder it's used so much on Fox News and The O'Reilly Factor.
Really, Since when has the Military and the multi-nationals every given a shit about the environment and those that live within it? The answer to that would be NEVER. War and Oil are way more important than any pesky critters they would say.
Humans seem to think that we're removed from the ecosystem so that if we destroy said ecosystem, it won't effect us, but that's the furthest thing from the truth. Destroy the ecosystem and you destroy ALL life, including us.
Bugs wrote: Perhaps the Navy could look into a means of warning these highly intelligent creatures before they begin testing in an area. Sort of like placing a bell on a cat to warn the songbirds using your garden?
An interesting idea, one that could work. Alas, given that the "effected" radius from a source is measured in hundreds of miles, it would take whales days to evacuate the area, with concommitant effects on their migratory patterns.
And as if the Navy/oil companies would wait to declare war or look for oil because of a few panicked whales. :(
Abolish corporate personhood; our only chance at regaining our world and the life within.
Start with that and then we get a handle on campaign finance reform.
We Must Retake our Government, our Social Services, our World Trade Contracts.
or we can keep what we have and die sadder…yet
This is another money vs environmant and animals thing.
Unfortunatly for the marine animals the people who do these things are only in it for the money.
Evil consumerist bastards
Seaflow (www.seaflow.org) is launching a campaign to fight the rampant spreading of noise pollution from the rapidly growing global cargo and oil supertanker fleet. It will launch its Sanctuaries Campaign this spring. It is also a part of a coalition of NGOs working to stop the Navy in California, Hawaii and globally at the UN and the International MAritime Organization. Get involved and stay tuned!
Perhaps the Navy could look into a means of warning these highly intelligent creatures before they begin testing in an area. Sort of like placing a bell on a cat to warn the songbirds using your garden?
It'd help some, since evidently whales already have learned somewhat and if we standardized the warning sounds, they would surely come to recognize them might flee the testing area if given a few hours warning>
This kind of behavior by the powerful: the military and the oil companies is psychopathic, an utter ignorance of our proper place in the world. The abuse of the marine commons is plainly hubris. And the ancient Greeks knew quite well how hubris would be dealt with: nemesis.
From Wikipedia: "Nemesis ... in Greek mythology was the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris, vengeful fate personified as a remorseless goddess. The name Nemesis is related to the Greek word νείμειν, meaning "to give what is due"."
The true irony is that whales are arguably the most intelligent form of life on this planet, owing to the fact that they have the largest brain to body mass ratio of all animals on Earth. We hear their songs and their speech; if only we could comprehend it. One can only imagine what the whales would have to say about our insanity.
What a tragedy. Just like on land, it is the innocents who pay, while the guilty continue to inflict their hate day after day after day.
On the bright side we humans are quite beneficial to rats and cockroaches as well as hosting numerous sexually transmitted diseases.
bbr-001 wrote: We should be able to find frequencies or other technologies not harmful the marine species.
Sorry, not possible. The "pings" from sonar and "bangs" from air guns are impulsive time functions, which mean they have a flat frequency response, i.e. equal power at all frequencies. Systems that generates certain frequencies have been designed and constructed: They resemble extremely large speakers, the size of a medium-sized house, are highly directional, require huge amounts of energy to drive and are incredibly unreliable (too many moving parts to operate in a highly corrosive environment). None of these attributes are palatable to the Navy or the oil exploration industry.
Whales are only one creature being devestated in the vast web of life. The range of damage undoubtedly impacts all other forms of life from miniscule to the beautiful giants - but we do not know how. By extrapolation of butterfly effect, in the 'information age' the void of information for 'security' purposes in constant floating rationale of human dominance... to the 'apathy' of people trying to make sense of a life in which information is denied begs the question of what we really mean when we talk about 'security'. Human governments are operating in a dangerous range of attention voids - and there is the old saw that nature abhors a vacume. Humility is a terribly underrated virtue, particularly as we increasingly stress the web of life.
These activities might do more damage to the whale population than the outright whaling by the Japanese. We should be able to find frequencies or other technologies not harmful the marine species.
What if they stop the testing and then we're attacked by whales? Brownie should look into this.
While containing the Navy's specious needs of training to locate threatening diesel subs 3,000 miles from their home base, the real source of noise dangerous to indigenous marine life comes from air guns used to map oil fields.
The big air guns generate signal with power approaching 235dB peak, comparable to sound pressure levels of 140-170dB in air (140dB is generated by a large military jet engine at 150'). If trapped in the SOFAR channel, air gun signals can travel across the Pacific Ocean. The entire marine soundscape is often dominated by the repetitive 'boom...boom...' of distant geophysical surveying. This incessant cacophony, an acoustic equivalent to the fabled 'Chinese water torture' deeply disturbs some individuals who are exposed to the sound over long periods. Perhaps it does the same to whales... Certainly many whale types now recognize seismic survey vessels and have been noted to stop feeding, even before surveys commence.
http://www.acousticecology.org/oceanairgunexecsumm.html