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Sea Change for Sonar?

2010-01-19T21:26:23Z

Barack Obama took office last January with a long to-undo list of terrible rules, decisions, and policies that the previous occupant (as Garrison Keillor might call him) inflicted on the environment. A few of these terrible rules had to do with the Navy’s use of mid-frequency active sonar – a technology known to injure and kill some species of whales and cause widespread disruptions in many others. As we reported one year ago, the Bush administration was doing its utmost to finalize the fed’s position on Navy sonar, in the form of three major rulemakings affecting most of the continental United States, before the torch was passed.

Change comes slowly, but sometimes it does come. Today the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced a new initiative that, at its core, is focused on identifying important marine mammal habitat where the Navy trains. This is welcome news for those of us who have repeatedly sued the Navy and NOAA over their failure to keep any habitat off-limits to sonar use.

Here are some of the highlights of today’s announcement (available here):

NOAA recognizes that “ongoing mitigation efforts must do more” to protect marine mammals from sonar, in part because of the “difficulties of limiting the impact of active sonar where the mitigation efforts depend on visual sighting of whales.” In other words: more must be done because keeping abreast of whales around a sonar ship (the Navy’s current practice) just doesn’t cut it. Even making this basic acknowledgment amounts to a major shift in Bush-era policy, which insisted, despite abundant scientific opinion and court findings to the contrary, that the Navy’s measures were sufficient.
The administration puts a great deal of emphasis on avoiding habitat: “Protecting important marine mammal habitat is generally recognized to be the most effective mitigation measure currently available.” This is another important break with Bush policy, which gave the Navy carte blanche over hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, with few if any meaningful restrictions. With this statement, NOAA has put itself in line with the prevailing consensus of the scientific community.
Going forward, NOAA has committed itself to conducting a series of workshops to identify important habitat; to assess the cumulative impacts of sonar, oil exploration, and other sources of ocean noise; and to improve monitoring of marine wildlife on Navy ranges. It also says that it will join negotiations between the Navy and NRDC over sonar mitigation – another welcome development.

So what does this all mean, practically, for the oceans? NOAA is clear that the new information it hopes to glean on habitat and monitoring could translate into revisions of the Bush rules and into more (and more effective) protections for marine mammals. Whether it will or not depends in part, of course, on the public, on the scientific community, and on NOAA itself, which has a clear mandate to protect marine mammals from sonar under federal law, but in the past has been bowled over by its more powerful sister agency.

NOAA, under Dr. Lubchenco, has put a premium on “marine spatial planning” – a very promising form of ocean zoning that my colleague Sarah Chasis has written about before. The administration’s efforts on sonar could dovetail nicely with its larger plans for the oceans. So we’re hopeful (and engaged), but as with many of Obama’s environmental initiatives, there’s still a long road ahead.

Scientists to Obama: Less Ocean Noise, Please

2009-10-07T19:44:04Z

If, like me, you're desperately concerned about the fate of the oceans, probably the most hopeful development this year is President Obama's launch of a new National Oceans Policy. The task force he convened in June recently came out with its Interim Report and, as my colleague Sarah Chasis wrote at the time, there's much to celebrate. Still, in a high-level document, there were bound to be a few omissions. One of the most salient - as a group of scientists said in a path-breaking statement released today - is the growing problem of undersea noise.

Navy sonar has received the lion's share of media attention, but it's not the only noise-maker in the sea. Biologists are deeply concerned about the gamut of sources that are contributing to this rapidly rising form of pollution: not just sonar, but also airguns used in oil-and-gas exploration, supertankers and large cargo ships, pile-drivers and dredgers used in construction, and on and on. When whales turn up on the beach with bleeding around their ears, we know there's a serious problem; ironically, the chronic noise that's destroying the ability of whales and other species to hear, feed, and find mates is more of a silent killer.

Today's statement from a group of marine scientists describes the problem eloquently:

The ocean is a world of sound. Animals such as whales, dolphins, and fish depend on hearing for communicating, foraging, finding mates, detecting predators, and maintaining family and social groups. Human activity is rapidly altering the ocean's natural acoustic habitats. Industrial and commercial underwater noise propagates over enormous distances, affecting millions of square miles of ocean. For example, background noise at the same low frequencies vital to many marine species has increased 100-fold in some locations over the last 50 years. This growing fog of noise is shrinking the perceptual world of whales and other marine life, undermining their ability to "see" with sound. Chronic noise exposure is a recently recognized, largely hidden threat that can reduce long-term survival rates, while exposure to loud noise can result in injury, and even death in certain circumstances. Today few places in the world's oceans remain free of noises from human activities.

The profile of the issue is almost certain to grow. At this moment, Interior Secretary Salazar is deciding whether to open portions of the outer continental shelf to new oil and gas exploration; some states, like Florida, are considering drilling right along the coast; and environmentalists fear a new and untrammeled Gold Rush in offshore development.

With all of this activity looming, the scientists are clear about what's needed. They urge President Obama towards an ocean policy similar to our successful "no net loss" of wetlands policy of the 1990s: "that no net increase in ambient noise occurs in U.S. coastal waters and that a schedule be established to realize substantial reductions in ocean noise by 2020." Remarkably, they write, many of the tools needed to curb the problem are currently available or soon will be.

What is needed - of course and as always - is the political will. Inclusion of undersea noise in the National Oceans Policy would make a very good start.

Hawaii's Resident Whales

2009-09-30T22:38:48Z

This morning NRDC filed a petition under the Endangered Species Act to protect one of Hawaii's most imperiled species: the near-shore population of false killer whales. As my colleague Andrew wrote earlier, the listing petition has much to say about the plight of these animals: about their steep decline over the last 20 years, their dangerously small numbers, and the threats that continue to face them. But the petition also speaks volumes about the remarkable place they live.

America's 50th state is located in an unproductive part of the Central Pacific that provides relatively little food for sea life. Against this backdrop, the islands themselves are a kind of oasis. Species that otherwise spend their entire lives in open water, ranging widely over hundreds or thousands of miles, are attracted to the islands and have made Hawaii their home. And it's not just false killer whales. Spinner dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, beaked whales, pilot whales - increasingly scientists are finding that so many of Hawaii's marine mammals, which were once thought to belong to basin-wide stocks, are actually full-time residents.

These local populations are part of what makes Hawaii such a unique place in the world for wildlife; they're also part of what makes it so vital to conserve. Hawaii's resident false killer whales are losing their food, getting hooked on fishing lines, and accumulating toxins at a rate that threatens their survival. Protecting them will go a long way towards protecting the islands' extraordinary marine environment.

Watch video of Hawaiian false killer whales here:

False Killer Whale Crittercam Video of the Hawaiian false killer whales

False Killer Whale Crittercam Additional video of the Hawaiian false killer whales

Whales and the Knife's Edge

2009-06-13T00:37:59Z

One of the big questions in marine mammal research these days is how Navy mid-frequency sonar kills marine mammals. Some scientists have looked to decompression sickness, or "the bends," for an answer, since investigators have repeatedly found bends-like symptoms in animals that sonar has left dying on shore. An important new paper out in Respiratory Physiology and Neurobiology adds fuel to that already stoked fire.

The new study modeled how several species of beaked whales manage their nitrogen levels as they go on their long foraging dives. It turns out that these deep-diving creatures are living daily on a kind of knife's edge, with enough nitrogen in their tissues to produce a severe case of the bends in land animals. The paper suggests that the whales adjust their dives to keep their nitrogen levels from maxing out - a life-saving move that a whale's frantic response to sonar would make difficult.

The Navy likes to remind us that the "bends" theory is just that - a theory. And that's a fair point. But some theories are better than others, and this one is supported now by at least four peer-reviewed papers on tissue pathology, two on dive physiology, and two on diving behavior, not to mention a succession of review papers, conference proceedings, and expert panels. There are no leading competitors.

All of this research has significant implications for marine wildlife. Beaked whales make up about one-fourth of all whale, dolphin, and porpoise species on earth, and the evidence increasingly shows that many of these remarkable animals live in small, discrete populations that are highly vulnerable to human change. And whatever theory proves correct, there is no question that naval sonar is gravely injuring whales at sea.

Consensus in the scientific community stands behind habitat avoidance as the best available measure for reducing harm to beaked whales and other species. Until now, though, the Navy has generally refused to adopt such measures, "saying [as today's AP story puts it] that there isn't enough scientific evidence to require them."

If the Navy doesn't care for the new paper, maybe it might have a look at another that came out last year. That one was entitled, "Navy sonar and cetaceans: Just how much does the gun need to smoke before we act?"

Navy Games

2009-04-09T22:23:26Z

The Obama Administration has put a premium on good science in environmental policy, but some folks in the Navy don't seem to have gotten the message.

In a study soon to be published in Biology Letters, researchers exposed a captive bottlenose dolphin to recordings of Navy sonar and then gave the animal a hearing test, to see whether it suffered hearing loss. In fact, the study is the latest in a line of similar experiments that the Navy has sponsored, usually on bottlenose dolphins since the Navy maintains several of the animals in captivity. In this case, it took higher sonar levels to produce hearing loss in that one animal than might have been predicted from earlier studies.

That's useful to know, and it adds to our existing knowledge about sonar's effects on marine mammal hearing. The problem is that the Navy, hungry for any science that might justify its recalcitrance on sonar policy, wants it to mean a lot more than it says.

Simply put, studies of hearing loss like this one don't address the central concerns that scientists have about sonar: its widespread impacts on marine mammal behavior, its long-term effects on marine mammal health, and its startling capacity to injure and kill certain species of whales.

Let's take mortalities first. Deep-diving beaked whales - exposed to levels of sonar much lower than those needed to cause hearing loss - have consistently turned up with hemorrhaging in their brains and emboli in their livers and other organ tissue. The leading theory is that Navy sonar drives them to alter their highly-evolved dive patterns in ways that induce "bends"-like injuries. This view is supported by multiple peer-reviewed articles on dive physiology, tissue pathology, and other subjects. And while a number of other mechanisms remain possible (an expert workshop organized by the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission identified several), hearing loss is not among them.

How to prevent these injuries is a deadly serious problem given that beaked whales make up one-sixth of all marine mammal species on earth. But the new study doesn't move us any closer to a solution and, quite reasonably, doesn't attempt to.

Nor does the new study contribute to our knowledge of an even more important problem: sonar's impacts on whale behavior. Navy sonar is known to cause whales and other marine mammals to stop vocalizing and feeding, to abandon habitat, to panic, to put themselves at risk of ship collision, and, in some cases, to strand and die. These impacts occur in some species at very low levels of sonar exposure and affect vast numbers of animals. Even the Navy estimates that its exercises off the coastal United States would significantly impact marine mammals more than 2 million times each year. All of these behaviors may be critical to survival, not just of individual animals but of entire populations, many of which are already endangered or depleted.

The new study has little, if anything, to say about these critical behavioral effects, and rightly so. "Boris," the dolphin used in the experiment, wasn't a wild animal or even an ordinary captive animal, but one that was specifically trained for years to stay on task during experiments.

But that won't stop the Navy from spinning the study as though it were some Archimedean lever displacing years of research on completely different issues. Hopefully, the press will put on the brakes.

Colbert Weighs In

2008-06-26T18:10:11Z

It is as we all feared. Stephen Colbert threw his considerable legal acumen into the ring last night, weighing in on NRDC v. Winter – our case about naval sonar training off California, which the Supreme Court will hear in the fall. Needless to say, whales seem about ready to join bears on Mr. Colbert’s enemies list.

Colbert cast a cold eye on the deaths attributed to the Navy’s exercises. “So now sound kills whales?” he asked derisively. “What doesn’t kill whales? Harpoons? Pollution? Queequeg?” And he issued a stern warning to the cetacean crowd: “Stop dying or you’ll find yourselves in Gitmo getting airboarded.” Most cutting of all, perhaps, was his coinage of the phrase “blubber huggers,” the utterance of which caused his lower lip to vibrate dramatically.

Colbert also had some choice things to say about the Exxon Valdez case (Exxon v. Baker), speaking as “a friend of the captain, Joe Hazelwood.”

Sonar and the Supremes

2008-06-25T01:00:23Z

One thing you get when your lawsuit is taken up by the Supreme Court, aside from supportive calls from friends, is a lot of interest from the media. That happened yesterday when the Supreme Court agreed to hear NRDC v. Winter – an important case that involves the Navy’s use of mid-frequency active sonar off the California coast.

The press has reported before on the environmental damage caused by naval sonar, but as a Supreme Court matter the issue will probably be new to many readers (and many reporters), and their understanding surely wasn’t helped by the Navy’s latest round of misinformation.

For example, Navy reps reportedly said to the Associated Press that only “five whales have been stranded and 37 whales have died because of sonar since 1996.” These numbers would be true if you (1) arbitrarily threw out most of the strandings that scientists have correlated with sonar use; (2) disregarded the biology showing that sonar injures whales at sea in addition to stranding them; and (3) assumed that all of the deep-water animals killed by sonar eventually beach on shore. (In fact, the government’s own scientists say injuries and deaths would rarely be documented.)

In its environmental assessment, even the Navy admitted that its exercises would cause widespread disruption (it predicted over 170,000 significant “takes” of marine mammals) and injure as much as one-third of an entire whale population.

The role of the courts is not merely to decide abstract legal questions; another of their core functions is to make findings of fact. In this case the lower courts reviewed thousands of pages of documents and set forth those facts – concerning both harm to the marine environment and the Navy’s ability to train – in extraordinary detail. The main Ninth Circuit judgment alone runs 108 pages. There’s a fundamental disconnect between what the judges have found and what the Navy tells reporters.

In the end, the courts required the Navy to reduce harm to marine life while training with sonar. But NRDC v. Winter isn’t a case about national security vs. whales, as many of the press stories had it yesterday. It’s about a federal agency taking an extreme position utterly out of line with the facts – and getting called on it.

Whales and Oil

2008-06-19T19:00:34Z

As offshore oil gets dragged once again onto the political scene, it’s worth remembering the environmental costs that led to the adoption of an offshore moratorium in the first place.

One of the seminal events in the modern environmental movement was the 1969 blow-out of Union Oil Platform A, which sent millions of gallons of crude into the Santa Barbara Channel and tarred beaches for miles along the California coast. The Santa Barbara spill became an object lesson for the hazards of offshore drilling, a lesson that has since been relearned in the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea, and many other locales here and abroad. But even aside from the occasional headline-gathering calamity, the search for oil at sea remains an environmentally risky business, and not only for its direct effects on humans.

Two weeks ago, for example, some 200 melon-headed whales stranded in the shallow waters of Loza Bay on the northwest side of Madagascar. ExxonMobil had been conducting an oil-and-gas survey nearby, using sonar a few days prior to the strandings to map the seafloor and later booting up powerful airguns to look for deposits below.

Melon-headed whales are deep-water animals that very seldom strand but seem acutely sensitive to man-made noise. A huge pod of melon-heads came into Hanalei Bay, on Kauai, in July 2004 as the U.S. Navy ran a major sonar exercise offshore. In that case residents managed after a day of struggle to lead the whales back out to sea, but the news from Madagascar is grim by comparison, with more and more animals reported dead. ExxonMobil suspended its operations, and an investigation into the strandings has begun.

Biologists who’ve looked at the problem of oil-and-gas exploration are concerned less about mass strandings than about subtler, more far-reaching effects on marine mammals: things like habitat abandonment and interference with breeding and foraging, which are not so easily observed but are probably occurring on a population scale. The die-offs in Loza Bay are just a reminder of what offshore oil means for the creatures who live offshore.