The Navy acknowledged that vessels on maneuver off Hawaii in July used their sonar periodically in the 20 hours before a large pod of melon-headed whales unexpectedly came to shore on the island of Kauai.
The acknowledgment added to an already contentious debate over whether the sound from Navy sonar has been causing marine mammals to strand.
Navy officials said a review of the July 3 incident indicates that two ships turned on their sonar between 6:45 and 7:10 a.m., by most accounts just before the unusual movement of almost 200 deep-water whales to the shoreline of a Kauai bay. The Navy had said earlier that no sonar was used until more than 90 minutes later, well after the animals came ashore.
Lt. Cmdr. Greg Geisen, the Navy spokesman responsible for information about the maneuver, said a Navy review of the incident concluded that the ships were either too far from the whales or were using the sonar at the wrong time to cause the mass movement.
“There is no evidence of a relationship here between the sonar use and the whale behavior,” he said.
But the newly released information from Geisen and other Navy officials – that the ships were testing their sonar in preparation for the maneuver on the day before the whales came ashore, and early on the morning of the near-stranding – has caused some observers to question that conclusion.
“Every time the Navy changes its story, it reduces its credibility on this issue,” said Cara Horowitz, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has sued the Navy over a related sonar issue. “The Navy would be better off spending more time developing common-sense ways to protect whales from sonar and less time denying a connection that is unfortunately been repeatedly shown.”
Officials at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which is looking into the incident, said it remains uncertain what caused the near stranding.
Residents and government officials worked throughout July 3 to steer the whales back to open water, and all made it except one newborn calf that died of starvation.
Navy officials are adamant about the need for sonar training. They say there is a substantial and growing threat from “quiet” diesel submarines that could menace the United States from coastal waters, and that only active sonar use can detect them. The Navy is planning a sonar training ground in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Carolinas.
The Hawaii incident is the third significant one involving sonar and marine mammal strandings near the United States since 2000. The stranding of 17 whales of various kinds off the Bahamas in 2000, which resulted in the death of at least six of them, occurred during a major Navy maneuver. Navy officials at first said there was no connection between their exercise and the stranding, but later acknowledged that the loud sound from the sonar had caused the animals to flee ashore.
Another incident, involving the destroyer USS Shoup, occurred off the coast of Washington state last year, where harbor porpoises unexpectedly came ashore after a sonar exercise. The Navy concluded that there was no connection between the two, but NOAA is still reviewing the incident.
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