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Review: 'War of the Whales' dives deep into a real-life mystery

 
Book jacket for Joshua Horwitz's book, "War of the Whales," published by Simon and Schuster. 2014
Book jacket for Joshua Horwitz's book, "War of the Whales," published by Simon and Schuster. 2014
Published July 23, 2014

Ken Balcomb had been studying whales for decades by March 15, 2000, work that often involved encounters with marine mammals stranded onshore. But that morning a whale beached itself alive just 100 yards from his home and research station on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas — a Cuvier's beaked whale, a deep-water denizen rarely observed and even more rarely stranded.

As Joshua Horwitz writes in his engrossing new book, War of the Whales: A True Story, Balcomb was both intrigued and concerned — but that whale was just the beginning. All that day, phone calls and radio messages streamed in from four Bahamian islands, reporting strandings of other Cuvier's as well as Blainville's beaked whales, minke whales and an Atlantic spotted dolphin (dolphins are small whales), some alive and others dying or dead. Balcomb soon realized he was in the middle of what turned out to be "the largest multispecies whale stranding ever recorded."

Like any scientist, he burned to understand why it had happened. The next day, he was on a reconnaissance flight in a small plane above the 3-mile-deep, 140-mile-long Grand Bahama Canyon, around which the islands where the strandings occurred cluster. The underwater abyss, home to colonies of beaked whales that have lived there for millennia, was where he conducted much of his research, and he knew that "something had gone horribly wrong inside the canyon."

From the plane, Balcomb saw a U.S. Navy destroyer. "He knew that destroyers rarely sailed alone, that they usually ran escort for a full battle group. So where were the other ships?"

Maybe one person in many millions would grasp what that destroyer's presence might mean. But Balcomb was that one: Decades before, he had served in the Navy in a top-secret project, the "Sound Surveillance System. … a radical innovation in antisubmarine warfare that enabled the U.S. Navy to maintain a critical advantage over the Soviets for 25 years."

During World War II, U.S. geophysicist Maurice Ewing discovered an underwater "deep sound channel" where sound waves can be transmitted for thousands of miles. The military perfected methods for tracking submarines using those channels to transmit low-frequency active sonar.

Sonar, of course, had been perfected in the animal kingdom for eons, and among the species that rely most on biosonar are beaked whales and other deep-diving whale species, who use it to navigate and hunt prey in the dark ocean depths. Balcomb came to suspect that the Navy's extremely high-decibel sonar tests, which had already been blamed for harming marine mammals elsewhere, had caused the disaster in the canyon.

Proving that cause and effect, and making the Navy take responsibility for it, took years. Joining Balcomb in that effort, among a host of others, was the book's other main character, Joel Reynolds. A crusading lawyer for the National Resources Defense Council, he was fresh off a successful effort to protect the calving grounds of gray whales in the Sea of Cortez when he came onto the case.

War of the Whales is a fascinating, colorful, deeply researched chronicle not only of what happened in Grand Bahama Canyon in 2000 and its aftermath, but of the intricate connections between military and scientific research, of the wonders and perils of the resulting technology, and of the frustrations and triumphs of our legal system.

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It is also carefully balanced; this is not a simplistic whales good/military evil recounting. Horwitz draws the reader into the history of submarine warfare, which was also the birthing ground for marine biology as a distinct area of science — the military learned the concept of sonar from the whales.

He is adept at explaining the scientific and technological details involved, and just as skillful at painting vivid portraits of a large cast of characters. There's oceanographer Walter Munk, "a playful pixie of a man with an incalculably high IQ," whose resume includes making marine weather predictions that ensured the success of the D-Day invasion and being one of the first scientists to gather evidence of global climate change. And there's Diane Ketten, the "whale coroner," whom Horwitz describes leaving a New Year's Eve party on Cape Cod when a sperm whale strands nearby to climb inside its head to collect samples, still wearing her velvet party dress. Among the first on the scene in the Bahamas, she'll find in the stranded whales' ear bones, a particular scientific passion of hers, essential evidence.

War of the Whales is a ripping real-life yarn well told, but it's also meant to raise our awareness of a larger problem. The Grand Bahama Canyon incident was hardly an isolated one. Ocean noise pollution has doubled in each of the last six decades, and military exercises are just one source, along with commercial shipping, oil and gas exploration and recreational boating — all of them imperiling cetaceans and other marine creatures in ways we are far from fully understanding. On July 18, despite objections by environmental groups and others, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced its approval for the use of sonic cannons by energy companies, as the entire Eastern Seaboard is opened to oil and gas exploration for the first time since the 1980s.

"Environmental campaigns," Horwitz writes, "have a lot in common with the Napoleonic Wars. They're prolonged and punishing offenses fought on multiple fronts, with success often determined by the strategic alliances you forge and the foot soldiers you mobilize. And they cost a lot of money."

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.