Tuesday March 21 8:29 PM ET

Bahamas Whales Deaths Prompt Probe

By JESSICA ROBERTSON, Associated Press Writer

FREEPORT, Bahamas (AP) - Eight whales beached and died soon after the U.S. Navy conducted anti-submarine exercises off the northern Bahamas, prompting an investigation and calls for an end to such exercises.

The Navy said Tuesday that there was no evidence to link the whale deaths to last week's exercise testing sonar detection of submarines.

Navy Cmdr. Greg Smith said the sonar tests were scheduled only one day and took place from about 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. March 15 off Abaco Island.

Marine biologist Ken Balcomb of the Earthwatch environmental group said beachings began that same day and within two days at least 14 whales had grounded themselves on Abaco, Grand Bahama to the north, and Eleuthera to the south. Eight died, prompting investigations by Bahamian and U.S. scientists and authorities.

``A whale beaching in the Bahamas is a once-in-a-decade occurrence,'' said Balcomb, an American who has been studying whales around Abaco island for nine years.

``We will be making recommendations to the Bahamian government that these sort of exercises be terminated,'' he said. ``The fact that it coincides with the military exercises cannot be just coincidental.''

But the Navy spokesman said there was no evidence linking the two events and the Navy planned to continue such tests.

``There's no suggestion we have, and no scientific data, that the testing that we are doing was in any way linked to the current, unfortunate demise of great mammals,'' said Smith.

``My understanding of the actual locations would put the island between the operations where the `sonobuoys' were located and where the whales eventually beached themselves,'' said Smith.

Naomi Rose of the Washington-based Humane Society of the United States, maintained the signals could still do damage.

``These signals, depending on frequency, could travel quite a distance and could even wrap around the island,'' said Rose, a marine mammal scientist. ``One could argue that they fled the area where the sonar was being transmitted.''

Another U.S. marine biologist here to investigate, Charles Potter of the Smithsonian Institute, said the number of whales beached is ``extremely unusual. But he said the postmortems showed the whales had suffered no physical damage, such as broken ear drums.

Balcomb said the mammals included several deep-water beaked whales, goose beaked whales measuring 16-19 feet, dense beaked whales measuring 10-13 feet, baleen whales measuring up to 27 feet and some small minke whales.

Michael Breynan, director of the Bahamian Fisheries Department, said he was working with U.S. scientists to try to determine the cause. Breynan said his department kept no records of beached whales but added: ``I am not aware of any similar incident (having occurred) in the Bahamas.''

He said further tests on the dead whales would be carried out in the United States, a process that could take months.

Smith said the exercise was testing for upgrades of what the Navy calls the Directional Command Activated Sonobuoy System.

The exercise involved a Navy P-3 aircraft dropping two buoys north of Abaco, one as close as 35 miles to the island, the other 70 to 75 miles from the island. One buoy emitted a sonar signal which was received by the other, and a submarine was moving between the two buoys.

He said the exercise had nothing to do with low frequency active sonar, a new and controversial system that transmits sonar pulses so loud they can match the roar of a rocket launch.

The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, responsible for overseeing all U.S. actions that could affect the environment at home or abroad, said it approved the Navy's environmental assessment for its exercise.

Roger Gentry, coordinator of the service's acoustics team, said the exercises shouldn't have affected the whales. ``Yet we have beached whales.''

The service has also sent veterinarians and acoustic experts to investigate.

Marine scientists have been expressing growing concern in recent years about the possible effects of man-made noises on marine mammals who rely on their hearing perhaps more than their sight.

``We already know from preliminary research that's been done that there are some problems with man-made noise in the marine environment,'' said Rose of the Humane Society.

However, other experts have been quick to point out that none of the research has been able to conclusively blame man-made noise for events such as the whale beachings in the Bahamas.

-- Moby (@ .), March 22, 2000

Answers

When the "Empress" was installed in the Mobile Bay area, there was a (hastily)muted outcry on behalf of marine life. Environmentalists also feared for human side effects, but little good it did them.

This area of the Gulf Coast has an anamlous pattern of nueral defects, congenital and acute. And this is saying a great deal, because the Gulf Coast is a sink of (allegedly) enviornmentally induced health problems.

The Navy also has the subsidy for investigating satellite influence on system performance (cf recent sircraft problems). Navy also running the sub GMT displays for public consumption on research sites.

Heads up, homeboys. Old hand sounding alert.Not enough to observe,may be time to implement corrective action-if possible.

-- another government hack (keepwatching_2000@yahoo.com), March 22, 2000.