Non-Navy Whales

You must have heard about the elite US military task force Navy Seals. In this post I will introduce you to another group, the Non-Navy Whales. This post comes courtesy of the article, Whales flee from military sonar, leading to mass strandings, research shows, by Damian Carrington, in The Guardian of July 3, 2013.

The article reports on a research program to figure out whether whales, in general marine mammals, are affected by sonar used by navy vessels to locate submarines. The funny thing is the effort was “part-funded” by the US Navy. When I read this, I was wondering why the US Navy would have wanted to carry out such research. What is in it for the US military?

Some sort of answer came from my reading of a book on statistics for laymen, Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan (W. W. Norton & Company, eISBN 978-0-393-08982-0). There is something called a null hypothesis, the starting assumption, that statisticians posit just to derive perverse pleasure in proving it wrong. To quote the author of the book, “… researchers often create a null hypothesis in hopes of being able to reject it.”

So, I surmise that the US military wanted to prove that the sonar signals they use in their operations and training exercises do not bother marine life. Their null hypothesis must have been something like, “Military sonar bothers marine life,” setting the scientists on a wild goose chase to prove that wrong.

Apparently, the scientists refused to play the game. “Whales flee from the military sonar used by navies to hunt submarines, research has proven for the first time.” Unfortunately for the US Navy, the null hypothesis stands vindicated.

That does not sit well with the part-sponsors of the research, for obvious reasons, negative RoI. What does it do? Calls in the spin doctors. The navy said, “…the findings only showed behavioral responses to sonar, not actual harm.” In Tamil, the saying goes, “Kuppura vizhunthalum meesaile mun ottale!” – I may have fallen flat on my face but the mud did not stick to my mustache.

It is apparently a statistical truth that “unusual mass strandings” have “soared since the introduction of military sonar since the 1950s.” Why did I put in the qualifier, “apparently”? Because, what is a “usual stranding” went undefined. However, “…naval activity was found to be the most probable cause of the deaths of at least 26 short-beaked common dolphins in Falmouth Bay, Cornwall in June 2008.” Still statistical, but this piece of information, while diluting my skepticism, belies what the navy had said, “not actual harm.” Death is actual harm, someone has to tell the US Navy.

There was a “missing link”, between military sonar activity and whale stranding. Now this puzzle has been solved, when they heard sonar, whales “swam rapidly away from the noise and some performed unusually deep and long dives” and “stopped feeing for 6-7 hours”. Indeed, because of sonar a whale also missed out on a sumptuous feast – one ton of krill.

Thus cornered, the US Navy now says, “We will evaluate the effectiveness of our marine mammal protective measures in light of new research findings.” The first thing I do upon reading or hearing a government statement is to assess whether it could have said anything substantively different, like in this case, “To hell with the whales!” So, the pious sentiment has no purchase.

Likewise the Royal Navy of the UK: “We are committed to taking all reasonable and practical measures to protect the environment and mitigate effects on marine mammals.”

The US and UK military establishments stand hoisted by their own petards.

Both learned that the whales are Non-Navy Whales and are nowhere as obedient as seals, the Navy Seals. There are things beyond military playgrounds, even in the oceans they may be.

Raghuram Ekambaram