Currents: science & conservation
Sonar range raises concern for whales
By Bo Peterson
Provided/Rachel Sayre/Wildlife Trust
Three right whales spotted by Wildlife Trust surveyors congregate about 6 miles off Hilton Head Island in December 2007.
The Northern right whale is a 40-ton, 60-foot-long giant with fins as big as boats. Though fewer than 400 are known to exist, more than four dozen were spotted swimming off South Carolina shores last winter, likely heading south to their calving grounds.
So few of these gentle mammoths remain that researchers consider every living whale vital to the species’ survival.
With such high stakes, the right whale has become a focal point in the controversy surrounding the U.S. Navy’s plan to establish a new sonar training range off the East Coast.
The Navy is trying to protect underwater turf it has used for training since World War II and to maintain federal environmental regulators’ approval against growing scientific concern for the effects of sonar and other loud noises on marine mammals.
After fierce opposition stymied an attempt to install the range off North Carolina, the U.S. Navy is now examining a proposal for a sonar range 50 miles out and slightly southeast of the Charleston Harbor jetties.
The range would be a 575-square-mile grid of 300 transducers sending sonar signals that are answered by sonar from submarines, ships or aircraft. It could be used for more than 150 exercises per year, six hours at a time, according to an environmental impact statement prepared earlier for the North Carolina range.
That, environmentalists say, could be lethal to a range of marine species, including the right whales recently spotted 7 to 25 miles offshore from Charleston.
Conservationists worry that sonar and other man-made noises could be deafening and frightening whales into lethal beach stranding and rapid surfacing. Whales are thought to communicate and navigate using whistles and echoes similar to sonar.
Location problems
The Navy withdrew its proposal for the North Carolina range in 2006 after facing steep opposition from conservation and fishing groups.
A year earlier, three dozen pilot, sperm and minke whales had beached and died on the Outer Banks after five long sonar blasts were transmitted from about 200 miles away.
Environmental advocates pushed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to release its necropsy report, saying the investigation of the incident smacked of a whitewash.
The report said damage from sonar cannot be ruled out as a cause, but the evidence for it “is not particularly compelling,” Brandon Southall, NOAA fisheries service deputy director, said at the time.
“There was no pressure” on the report’s investigators by the Navy or on its behalf, said one of the investigators, Aleta Hohn of the fisheries service, as she answered questions during a teleconference. She stopped short of saying the investigation did not find a reason for the stranding. “We just don’t know enough about what causes strandings.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council said the report, while not directly tying sonar to the incident, eliminated other potential causes and underscored the need for more study of the range’s risks to whales and other marine animals.
The Charleston site is one of five alternatives originally proposed as sites for the range. It had been dropped because it didn’t have equipment to handle secure data transmissions, said Jene Nissen, a Navy study projects manager.
Since then, improvements have been made and the site will be included as one of four alternatives when a new environmental impact statement for the range goes to public hearings in early fall.
The North Carolina range, within 200 miles of Charleston, also will be included; it was the preferred site in the earlier proposal.
Balancing act
Reworking military training to be more sensitive to wildlife is an emerging worldwide trend. The same wide expanses of land, air and sea that are needed for training are recognized as critical habitat for endangered species.
Michael Jasny, policy analyst from the Natural Resources Defense Council, said training has been diverted from critical habitat in our locations.
“North Atlantic right whales are among the most endangered marine mammals on the planet. Scientists, government agencies and conservationists have struggled for years and with enormous effort to save them from extinction,” Jasny said.
“Yet the Navy is refusing to avoid important whale habitat, a measure that even it admits would significantly reduce impacts to right whales and numerous other species,” he said. “This is an unsupportable position, at odds with several recent court decisions, with the science and with any balanced approach to coastal management.”
The other three impact statements include one for the traditional overall training grounds along the Southeast coast and Gulf of Mexico, including South Carolina.
That statement, in which the Navy acknowledges that sonar draws reactions from whales, was the subject of a preliminary public hearing in Mount Pleasant in mid-March.
Thirty people from a variety of conservation and military interests showed up at that public hearing, run by a uniformed military judge.
The only audience members who spoke, however, were three students from Christ Our King-Stella Maris school: one in favor of the range, two against it.
Fishermen contacted for this story said they hadn’t heard much about the sonar range.
The statement proposes four alternatives. They include:
Continuing the training that has been conducted offshore 40 years without restrictions.
Restricting it to specific areas offshore.
Rotating it seasonally among sites along the range in the Atlantic and Gulf.
“It goes through the motions of assessing what the impacts to marine animals would be,” Jasny said.
But its preferred alternative is to continue training without restrictions, he said. “This document has all the hallmarks of a political document, not a scientific decision made by environmental planners.”
The other two impact statements being prepared for operations off the Southeast coast would include Charleston. Navy officials said they need to keep a wide expanse of training ranges available and that they have worked to mitigate the effects of mammals and other marine life.
“We have to find different areas to train. What the threat is today, we have a pretty good handle on. What the threat is next month, we have a pretty good handle on. What the threat is two or three months down (the road), we are less sure of,” Nissen said.
“We can’t dictate where or when the opposition is going to activate sonar. We do watch for whales. We do listen for whales. When we find whales, we tone down or secure (turn off) our sonar.”
Bo Petersen is a reporter for The Post and Courier. Reach him at 745-5852 or bopete@postandcourier.com.
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