LA Weekly

Okay, those aren't exactly the words the Center for Biological Diversity used in its far more soberingly worded press release today. But it's the basic sentiment: “Whether the blue whales are being disoriented by military sonar, toxic algae or something else entirely," it reads, "the single most effective thing we can do to protect blue whales is to slow down large ships.”

If you live in Southern California and pay any attention at all, you know that three blue whales in less than two weeks have turned up dead in the Santa Barbara Channel here off Southern Calfornia's coast, all of them thought to have been struck by ships. But what you and almost nobody else knows is this: What causes a deftly echolocating ocean beast to collide with a speeding tanker that can be heard three days away? Blue whales, the largest living mammals, can map an entire ocean by sending out their call. How the hell are they plowing into ships the size of small cities?

Could it be that they're suffering from the same toxic algae that disorients dolphins and sea lions, known as domoic acid? The toxin has increased in the seas as they've warmed , say some marine biologists, and the whales have been lingering in a place they typically breeze by. But has domoic acid ever killed a whale before? "They seem awfully big for that," said one biologist I talked to on the phone yesterday. Okay, maybe.

Or could it be that our brave Navy has been blasting noise into the ocean for the last three weeks, noise that could break the eardrums of humans?

On September 11, a federal court told the Navy to go ahead with its mid-range frequency sonar exercises until it makes a final decision about it. Which means that whales have a new obstacle in the already noisy ocean: 235 decibels of screeching noise, as high as a terrier's bark and 400 10,000 billion times as loud. The federal government knows for sure that this exact sonar has killed other whales before: a group of smaller, more elusive beaked whales that came ashore in the Bahamas six years ago. Three of those dead whales had bloodied eardrums, another had bleeding on the brain.

The blue whales lost off our coast, however, were so far gone by the time they were examined that it was pretty hard to tell anything about their eardrums. Said Frances Gulland of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California, "their organs weren't fresh enough to determine that."

I have a news story coming out about this tomorrow night, but there's way more to be said about this that couldn't be expressed in a one-page news story, including the deep, horrified scream I feel making its way out of my body every time I think about how 235 decibels of mid-frequency noise sounds to an animal who relies on sound for its map of the world. Of course scientists have "no evidence" that sonar confused -- or even killed -- the whales. But they don't have any evidence that it didn't. And to me, it's pretty hard to believe that it didn't.

At any rate, I'm all for slowing down the ships, which the CBD says will reduce pollution anyway. The CBD has thus petitioned both Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and William Hogarth of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to "set a speed limit of 10 nautical miles per hour in the Santa Barbara Channel for all vessels 65 feet or larger until the whales have left the channel," noting that the Fisheries service has already proposed this on the east coast to protect the nearly extinct right whale.

I am for this. But I'm also for the most elementary common-sense precaution to protect these rare and astonishing creatures.

Stop Navy sonar testing now, and in all whale migration seasons in the future. It's insane.

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