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when he couldn't predict which of his aging cars and boats would start. There were occasions when he ate roadkill rabbits. With little bent for fund-raising or filling out grant proposals, he still relies on scattered donations and payments from Earthwatch volunteers. His Center for Whale Research, based in his San Juan home, most closely resembles a disheveled flea market.
He'd have it no other way. He is guided, he explains, by a lesson learned years ago in Navy flight school: When you're up there, it's you and the instructor, who says he's not in control, you are, and the plane doesn't care where it goes, what it does. Same with life, Balcomb decided. If you give up control, which most people do, well, that's it. That's everything.
Hours after Balcomb cut off and froze the two whales' heads, Darlene Ketten of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution arrived in the Bahamas. She'd been summoned by federal agencies because she was an expert in animals' sensory systems, especially whales' ears. On the beach, she cut into one of the heads. She saw bleeding in the brain case and auditory canal. This wasn't typical death throes or the result of stranding. This was unusual trauma, possibly shared by other nearby whales.
Ketten's hands dripped as she cut. "This tissue," she said, "is a lot bloodier than I'd expect."
Ken Balcomb held a videocamera to his eye, recording her every move. His pulse quickened. Here possibly, he believed, was the first tangible proof that sonar harmed marine mammals. Here also was his chance to learn at the elbow of a master. He marveled at Ketten's knowledge and ability. He saw himself as her assistant. He thought all was "way cool."
They were both voyeurs at heart, trying to imagine the world of whales, but they did so in far different ways. Where Ken Balcomb observed marine mammals at sea, Darlene Ketten studied their anatomy in laboratories, trying to "see" whales' hearing by looking at the design of their ears. He was driven by passion for his subjects, she by intricate structures and the rigors of science. He had no graduate degree; she had a master's in biological oceanography from MIT and a doctorate in comparative anatomy from Johns Hopkins. He was self-employed; she had joint appointments at Woods Hole and Harvard University's medical school.
Two weeks after the Bahamas stranding, past midnight in a Boston lab, Ketten and Balcomb again stood together. This time they were studying a beaked whale's head on a three-dimensional CT scanner. They both saw the same thing--pools of blood in the inner ears and brain case. They both knew they were looking at confirmation of what they'd seen on the Bahamas beach. Despite the late hour, Ketten felt compelled to reach for the phone. "I figure you guys should know we have an unusual case," she told Bob Gisiner at the Office of Naval Research.
Ketten, however, didn't feel ready to offer a conclusion. She understood too well that she occupied a hot seat: Given the Navy's presence in the Bahamas, there'd be lots of people wanting particular answers--and right away.
Instead of obliging them, Ketten first wanted to see the whales' inner ears on the cellular level. No matter her expertise in forensic radiology--if there was more definitive proof, she needed to get it. That's what the Navy and federal agencies would expect. They'd favor hard fact over her surest judgment.
Seeing whales' inner ears isn't easy, though; they're protected by some of the densest bone known. To get to them without inflicting harm, Ketten would have to dissolve that bone gently--an 18-month process. "You're causing me a whole lot of work," Ketten told Balcomb.
His eyes stayed on the image before him of bloody whales' ears. Although Ketten's expertise fascinated him, he didn't think he needed her wisdom to grasp the meaning of this CT scan. Blood in a whale's ear and brain, that wasn't normal. That just wasn't normal.
The Bahamas stranding could not have come at a worse time for the U.S. Navy. Increasingly concerned that it couldn't detect a new generation of nearly silent diesel-electric submarines, the Navy in the mid-1980s had started developing a form of low-frequency active sonar, LFA, that casts a penetrating sonic floodlight for hundreds of miles, saturating the ocean with intense sound. From 1988 through 1994, the Navy had secretly conducted 22 tests at sea. They'd been nearing deployment in 1995 when an obscure article in a technical journal described details of the new system. At the same time, a few sources began to leak information to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. In August 1995, the NRDC wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Navy, asking that LFA be submitted to federal environmental review under, among other laws, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.
The Navy had never before felt obliged to jump through such hoops, but it had recently lost another legal battle with this group. Their lawyers didn't want a repeat. In July 1996, the Navy agreed to prepare an environmental impact statement. What followed looked to some in Washington like a paperwork drill. Eventually, the Navy asked the National Marine Fisheries Service for an exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act, allowing it to "harass" a small number of marine mammals during LFA operation. In October 1999, the Fisheries Service gave advance notice of a proposed rule granting the Navy that exemption.
It was just six months later that the 16 marine mammals stranded themselves in the Bahamas. In the early days and weeks, the Navy publicly denied any connection. There'd been anti-submarine warfare exercises in the Bahamas, a spokesman acknowledged, but there was no "evidence or scientific data" in any way linking them to "the unfortunate demise of great mammals." A Fisheries Service preliminary report agreed, saying it was "unable at this time to link the biological damage to a specific source of acoustic energy or pressure . . . . We do not know what caused the animals to strand." In a telephone interview with reporters, Darlene Ketten said the proximity of the stranding and Navy sonar "raises a red flag," but "I'm still not ready to say the Navy did that."
It felt to Ken Balcomb as if a door had slammed shut. Since his night in Ketten's lab, he'd heard little from her or anyone else. Despite requesting an "objective, timely and transparent" inquiry, he could see no progress toward explanations or conclusions.
He'd later say that he developed no dark theories from all this. Yet he did think the Navy and Fisheries Service wanted things to move slowly. He feared that the Bahamas stranding would get buried, that attention would wane if reports were delayed. With appreciation, he began to eye his videocamera. He'd taped the whale strandings; he'd taped Darlene Ketten's necropsies on the Bahamas beach; he'd taped the CT scans in the Boston lab. Now he was glad he had.
In early May, eight weeks after the stranding, Balcomb flew to Washington to appear at a press conference organized by several environmental groups. He stopped first at the Fisheries Service's offices in Silver Spring, Md., where an old grad-school friend, Roger Gentry, headed the acoustical research team. They'd worked together in the field and had stayed at each other's homes with their families, but on this late afternoon, Gentry wasn't in sight. Balcomb showed his videotape instead to several other Fisheries Service officials. As Balcomb recalls it, they were "not pleased." They wished he wouldn't participate in the press conference; they wished he weren't there.
He could see possible repercussions now but didn't care. He owed it to the whales, he believed. How could he know something about whales and not reveal it for their benefit?
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