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Eight Whales Die, Scientists Blame Navy

© Matt Villano

Eight whales beached and died earlier this month, just hours 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 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. "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."

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,'' she said. "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 that he was not aware of any similar incident in the Bahamas. He said that further tests on the dead whales would be carried out in the United States, a process that could take months.