 2 WHALE BEACHINGS PROBED Palm Beach Post -- Thursday, June 21, 2001 By: William M. Hartnett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Navy officials said Wednesday they have not conducted exercises in recent weeks off Florida's coast using active sonar equipment, which some scientists believe can damage the sensitive auditory organs of whales. The possibility that such activity had taken place was raised after two beaked whales were found stranded on a beach near Indian River Shores Sunday morning. One whale was dead by the time a team from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution arrived and the other was later euthanized because it was in such poor health. Both were malnourished. The Navy's only significant operation in the western Atlantic in recent weeks was sea trials of the USS Winston S. Churchill, one of its newest destroyers, said Lt. Cmdr. John Kirby of the Second Fleet in Norfolk, Va. During the "shock trials" that concluded June 11, underwater explosions were set off to test the ship's structural integrity. None of the Churchill's sonar systems was involved in the tests, and a National Marine Fisheries Service spokesman has said it is unlikely the detonations were to blame for the beaching. "I'm not going to speculate on the cause of the stranding. That's for the scientists to determine," Kirby said. "But just to set the facts straight, we weren't doing (sonar) exercises in the vicinity of Florida." Beaked whales, if not actually rare, are rarely spotted by humans. The distinctively long-snouted mammals tend to keep to deep ocean waters, and mass strandings are infrequent. When they do occur, such cases draw particular interest from biologists and environmentalists who suspect beaked whales are especially susceptible to a new generation of sonar technology designed to pinpoint nearly silent modern submarines. Navy and NATO tests of these low-frequency active sonar technologies and exercises involving other active sonar systems have been implicated in several mass strandings of beaked whales in recent years. But official reports on these incidents did not pinpoint artificial sonar pulses or any other single factor for blame. Darlene Ketten, an expert on how whales hear and underwater acoustic trauma, told a Canadian newspaper last year that this focus on low-frequency sonar was misplaced and that sonars as a whole are a serious concern. Ketten, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a professor at Harvard Medical School, will examine the heads of the whales that beached in Indian River County for signs of such trauma. It will be weeks before any conclusions can be drawn from the tests, she said. Copyright (c) 2001, The Palm Beach Post |