GOVERNMENT COVER-UP

OR SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE?

The shocking truth about why whales beach themselves!

The SeaQuake Solution

Capt. David Williams
Deafwhale Society, Inc.

david (at) deafwhale.com

 

(web site under construction)

 
 
News Flash: 02/11/2012: Dolphins washing ashore on Cape Cod are injured upstream  by the oil industry activities ongoing
off the coast of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland,  and Greenland. Cape Cod should expect more beachings.  
 
 

  

Marine mammals scientists have known why whales beach themselves for decades; yet, they promote outdated and invalid stranding concepts in an effort to turn the public's attention away from acoustical pollution by the navy and oil industry.

Why? Because these two groups supply a whopping  98% of all whale research funds worldwide. The scientists know that if they do not protect the source of their funding, they will not get any more free taxpayer money. Professors Hal Whitehead and Linda Weilgart, at Canada's Dalhousie University, also agree that the public is being deceived (link) (link) (link).

The corruption also extends to NOAA, which hands out millions of taxpayer dollars every year as payoffs to the "save-the-whale" rescue teams (link). Why?  Because the rescue teams are first at the scene, and in a position to control the media and make sure the navy and the oil industry don't get blamed (link). In the mean time, NOAA whale experts use taxpayer money to buy themselves a party yacht (link).

But before I tell you more on the corruption that's killing our whales (see below), please allow me to explain how the cover-up works...

The real danger from exposure to the underwater activities of the navy and the oil industry is barosinusitis, not deafness. Barosinusitis is a pressure-related diving injury that occurs when marine mammals are exposure to excessive changes in the surrounding (ambient) water pressure.   

Marine mammal scientists know this to be true; however, rather than research ways to prevent barosinusitis, they have mislead the public with such ideas as social cohesion (mass suicide), biosonar failure due to slopping beach, chasing prey too close to shore, sharks, killer whales, parasitic worms, viruses, bacteria, fungal infections, red tides, severe storms, geomagnetic navigation failure, geomagnetic storms, phases of the moon, sun spots, heavy metals, immune failure, ingestion of plastic bags, movement of ice sheets, and movement of nutrient-rich waters closer to shore.

The truth is that only one brief sentence has ever leaked out from the scientific community that came close to explaining why whales strand themselves. In 1962, Dr. Francis Fraser, the curator of marine mammals at the British Museum of Natural History offered the following insight on barosinusitis while commenting (link) on the mystery of why whales beach themselves. He said:
 

       "It is very easy to imagine a condition in which the air-sac system has broken down, so that it is no longer reflecting, and, with the isolation of the essential organs of hearing disrupted, the animal may lose its sense of direction."  

 

Barosinusitis is indeed a condition in which the air-sac system (aka: pterygoid sinuses) has broken down. These small sacs of air surround the cochlea, acoustically isolating it from the whale's own loud voice. The air in these sinuses also deflects and channels sound around inside the whale's head like light bouncing off mirrors (ref)  (ref). This acoustic deflection/channeling prevents sound waves from hitting the cochlea from all directions—a must if the whale is to determine the azimuth of any returning echonavigation signals. Dr. Fraser was right—if the air-sac system suffers a pressure-related injury, the whales lose their sense of direction!

Today's marine mammal scientists (and the US Navy) know that healthy, functional sinuses are an absolute must if the whales are to dive and feed themselves. Working sinuses are also necessary if the whales are to use their biosonar to fix their position in the sea. This fact was confirmed in a 2004 article (link) in which US Navy scientists had the following to say about air cavities in the heads of dolphins:

 

     "... the presence of air around the bulla (cochlea) contributes to the acoustic isolation of the ears by providing a sound-reflective barrier between them. The almost complete dorsomedial coverage of the bulla (cochlea) with air should contribute to the animal's ability to differentiate time of arrival differences by impeding conduction through soft tissues that exist between the ears. In combination with other air spaces in the head, this should allow dolphins to capitalize on spectral differences in received signals due to shadowing and may contribute to minimum auditory angular resolution in the vertical and horizontal planes. Position, geometry, and volume of the air spaces within the head of the dolphin are important components of both the sound production and reception process and care should be given to their properties when developing models of biosonar production and hearing in dolphins."

 

So why aren't marine mammal scientists and the navy, who both know the truth, telling the public about the dangers of barosinusitis in whales? The obvious answer is that those getting the taxpayer dollars are pretending not to know why whales beach themselves so that they continue to get free taxpayer dollars! The Navy and the oil industry are bribing marine mammal scientists not one time, but continuously. Keep your mouth and you can keep counting your money.

Who can blame them?  Free money from the stupid taxpayers and a free luxury yacht to party on. The taxpayer even pays the fuel bill.

Mass stranding toothed whales (odontoceti) live far offshore in tight social groups. Because they dive every day in search of food, and because they depend on their biosonar to navigate, any type of pressure-related injury that would break down their air sinuses would disrupt their ability to interpret returning navigational echoes and also make it impossible for them to carry out feeding dives.

Assume that a navy sonar, seismic airgun array, explosion, undersea earthquake, volcanic eruption, or meteorite impact has happen and caused a series of severe pressure oscillations in the water surrounding a family of diving whales. If exposed to rapidly changing in external pressure while diving, the air in their heads will expand and contract in direct proportion to the changing water pressure (Boyle's Gas Law). The volume of air in the sinuses could easily be reduced to 1/4th normal as the pressure phase crosses over the pod. When the vacuum phase passes a microsecond later, the volume of air in the sinuses would quadruple. Assuming the frequency of these pressure oscillations at 10 cycles per second, and the duration of disturbance at 15 seconds, the volume of air in the sinuses would bounce back and forth from a 400% increase to a 400% decrease (800% change), 10 times per second for 15 seconds (150 times in 15 seconds). Because the air in the enclosed air spaces compresses and expands rapidly during the passing of the disturbance, while bodily tissues, blood, and bones do not, strong pressure differentials develop at air-filled interfaces causing shear forces that tear, bruise, and disrupt tissues, membranes, and small blood vessels. The air would be displaced into the surrounding tissues while the sinus cavities fill up with blood. When such a disaster happens to a pod, each whale loses its ability to dive and feed itself along with its sense of direction.

Allow me to elaborate further. If you called toothed whales and dolphins "airheads", you'd be correct because approximately 30% of an odontoceti's head is filled with a mixture of air and foam enclosed inside sinuses and air sacs of all shapes, including the pterygoid, peribullary, maxillary sinuses shown in the illustration on the right. The health of these sinuses is critical to a diving whale's survival because, as mentioned above, the air and foam serve to channel sound inside their heads and make their biosonar work. They also use these air sinuses to generate clicks and whistles. If a major disturbance in ambient pressure occurs around a pod of whales, it injures all their air sacs and sinuses at the same time.

As Dr Fraser suggested 50 years ago, the entire pod would simultaneously – and instantly – lose its sense of direction! 

Read more: "The Acoustic Function of the Air Sacs."

It stands to reason that a pod of lost, injured whales would group together on the surface for protection against sharks. The question is: where would the average man expect to encounter a pod of whales suffering from barosinusitis? The simple answer is on the beach.  Again, allow me to explain. If the water was calm like the surface of a small pod, the lost pod would swim in random directions, like a group of lost people wandering around on a desert. But the dynamic ocean is rarely calm. Surface currents would present much greater resistance when the lost whales tried to swim in any directions except with the flow of the current.

It is important to understanding whale strandings to grasp this simple concept.  Whales are always traveling with the flow of the surface currents when they go ashore and never against the flow!  It's the path of least resistance, and always taken by any lost object moving through a system. For example, water flowing downhill follows the path of least resistance. Storms travel on the path of least resistance by flowing toward zones of low barometric pressure, where lower air density offers less impedance than does higher pressure zones. Thus, without a sense of direction, and no land marks to guide them, the lost pod will always swim downstream with the flow of the surface currents. 

The path of the surface currents might take them into the open sea where they are taken by large oceanic sharks. On the other hand, the surface currents might also take them towards land, in which case they would eventually swim into a beach. Why a beach? Because the current guiding the whales is the same energy that carried each grain of sand to build the beach in the first place. Wherever current washes ashore, you find a beach, along with seaweed, plastic jugs, coconuts, and beached whales. Where current does not wash ashore you find rocks and no flotsam and no stranded whales.   more on surface currents and stranded whales...

The surface currents pick the stranding beach, not the whales. Or, maybe I should say the wind picks the stranding beach since the direction and strength of the wind exerts a powerful influence over the surface currents. For example, a gale force wind blowing toward shore could cause the current to wash non-navigating whales onto a rocky coast.

Tidal flow also plays a part in selecting the final stranding spot. As an example, if a lost pod of dolphins approached shore near an inlet to a backwater lagoon when the tide was rising, they could easily be guided by the inflow through the inlet and into the lagoon. The lost pod would swim inside the lagoon until their bellies made contact with the muddy bottom. Then they'd stop swimming and mill around until the tide dropped and left them stuck in the mud.

You can prove that the direction of wind and the surface currents pick the beach with your own eyes. Look at the picture of a calm beach on the left. There is no shoreward wind. Now look at the picture on the right. The wind is blowing from the sea toward the beach, and setting a strong shoreward flow to the surface currents. You will never see a lost pod of whales or dolphins swim ashore when the sea is flat calm—the lost pods always come ashore when the wind and surface currents are directed shoreward. The stronger the shoreward flow, the greater is the chance that a lost pod will be washed ashore! Look at the stranding pictures on this web page. Notice the struggle the rescuers are have trying to push the whales back out to sea against the incoming flow of the surface currents.  Now look at the following videos and notice the rough seas in the background. (video1)  (video2)  (video3)  (video4) (more videos coming). Of course, it all depends on the wind speed at the time the whales came ashore, not when the camera arrives. 

One other point should be made... 90% of all strandings are reported early in the morning by the first person on the beach. This means that 90% of all stranding occur at night. Why?  Because lost whales suffering from barosinusitis can usually avoid a stranding during the day by (a) raising their heads out of the water and looking around, or (b) by visually observing the sandy bottom. 

Because sharks have no swim bladders or air sinuses, they would not be injured by a major disturbance in pressure. Sharks would recognize such an underwater disturbance as a dinner bell and come looking for victims. They would be able to sense that the whales were injured. But as long as the pod swam in a tight group, the sharks would respect their strength in numbers and leave them alone.

Let me repeat, whales and dolphins hang out in tight groups for protection against big hungry sharks and killer whales—not social cohesion.

Sharks trail these wounded pods like wolves dogging a herd of elk. They wait patiently for a straggler to fall behind. The injured whales are aware of the waiting sharks so they stay close to their podmates. This is called a herd instinct; the same behavior shown by any group of mammals worried about predators. Place several dozen humans adrift in the open sea and see how long it takes them to get close to each other.

In 1971, in an article entitled, "Geometry For The Selfish Herd," evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton asserted that each member of the herd reduces the danger to itself by moving as close as possible to the center of the group. Thus the herd appears as a unit as it moves together, but its function emerges from the uncoordinated behavior of self-serving individuals. It's foolish to think that whales go ashore in response to the distressed cries of their podmates. Rather, individuals are quick to follow another member because they themselves are lost and have no idea which way to swim to reach safety.  They don't know they are about to be trapped in the sand. They are not following a leader; they are moving away from the sharks off in the distance behind them and following another lost whale that appears to know where it is going. It truly is the blind following the blind.

What if you knew sharks were waiting just offshore, would you swim off by yourself?  The terror each individual must experience when alone in shark-infested waters explains why injured individuals, when freed, will not swim away from the beach until the rest of the pod is also freed. They are not expressing sympathy, social cohesion, nor strong social bond; rather, they know the odds that they might be the next shark attack victim is greatly increased if they swim away alone.


SO WHAT IS THE REAL CAUSES OF STRANDINGS IN WHALES?

We know underwater explosions can cause biosonar-disabling barosinusitis; as can exposure to powerful navy sonar and oil industry air cannons. In fact, any disturbance in the sea that generates rapid and excessive changes in the surrounding water pressure can rupture a whale’s sinuses. Nature can easily generate such changes. For example, a meteorite’s impact with the ocean's surface would produce a series of potent pressure oscillations. So would an undersea earthquake. The vertical jerking of the seabed acts like a giant piston, pushing and pulling at the water, generating a series of intense low-frequency changes in pressure called seaquakes.  (aka: ocean acoustic waves or t-waves). 

Sailors have reported violent encounters with seaquakes since the beginning of recorded history. Hundreds of these eyewitness accounts (and other evidence) are posted on two websites (1750 to 1899)  (1900 to 2009). Reading these two web sites will convince you beyond even the slightest doubt that seaquakes do indeed cause whales to strand!

As touched on above, the stranding beach is always located downstream from the point of injury. I've traced approximately 500 beachings over the past 40 years. On average, seaquake-injured whales swim about 2,600 miles downstream from the epicenter before they strand. This journey takes an average 27 days.

 

THE COVER-UP OF BAROSINUSITIS IN WHALES!

 

Not one marine mammal scientists has ever been curious about whether whales simply lose their sense of direction and swim into a sandy beach with the flow of the surface currents. It's understandable that the public might not realize stranded whales always swim with the flow but how is that marine mammal scientists are so blind to the obvious?

Look at the picture on the right... you can see the waves rolling in. This tells you that a strong shoreward wind in blowing setting the surface currents toward the beach. Examine videos and pictures taken during strandings, not afterward. If you look close you can see the surface current washing ashore. In many pictures and videos you see flotsam and sea weeds washing ashore with the whales. Why can't the experts make such a simple observation? Pretending to be ignorant of the obvious is the strongest evidence of a cover-up.

Nor has any whale expert published a paper on barotrauma or barosinusitis in mass stranded whales. We have excellent and detailed government publications on barotrauma in fish (link). Why don't we have something similar in stranded whales?

The mystery of why whales mass strand has been around since the beginning of recorded history; therefore, the cause has to be something that has been around just as long.  Undersea earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and meteorite impacts certainly fit the time frame. These events would produced a series of potent pressure changes in the water and could indeed breakdown the air-sac system and cause an entire pod of whales to get lost. Is such an idea so complicated that it defies the imagination of whale experts? It seems reasonable that such a simplistic concept would have been ruled in or out decades ago. Why not? 

We know that seaweed, floating garbage, driftwood, dead fish, dead whales, and other stuff drifting in the sea is carried to the beach by the surface currents so why not live whales who have lost their sense of direction? After all, the flow of the current is the same force that carried each grain of sand to built the beach in the first place. Again, is this idea too complex for whale experts? 

Dr. Francis Fraser gave scientists the best clue to the stranding mystery 50 years ago when he said it was easy for him to imagine a condition in which the air-sac system had broken down. Why is it that no other marine mammal scientists in the last 50 years has considered the loss of directional senses from a broken down air-sac system as an answer to the stranding mystery?

Could the reason whale experts do not support the SeaQuake Solution be because the breakdown of the air-sac system due to seaquake-induced barotrauma is an identical injury to the break down of the air-sac system induced by oil industry air cannons, explosives, and navy sonar?  

The new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE), the former Minerals Management Service (MMS), was and still is a corrupted puppet of the oil industry. This government group collects fees from the oil industry and hands them out to scientists to study the environmental impact of the industry.  The BOEMRE and the US Navy, fund 98% of all marine mammal research worldwide. In other words, by controlling BOEMRE, the Navy and the oil industry control 98% of all the money available to study whales and dolphins.

According to the Washington Post (and many other sources) dirty dealing and corruption has plagued this downright dysfunctional government agency for decades. Read these shocking links: (link) (link) (link) (link) (link). Since its inception, and in particular since the 1980s, BOEMRE has been embroiled or implicated in numerous scandals. For example, in 1990 BOEMRE employees were linked to prostitution. One BOEMRE female official got pregnant from sleeping with an oil and gas lobbyists. In September 2008, reports by the Inspector General of the Interior Department were released that implicated over a dozen BOEMRE officials of unethical and criminal conduct in the performance of their duties. The investigation found BOEMRE employees had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sex with oil and gas energy company representatives. BOEMRE staff had also accepted gifts and free holidays amid a culture of ethical failure. The New York Times revealed "a dysfunctional organization that was riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch. A May 2010 inspector general investigation revealed that BOEMRE regulators in the Gulf region had allowed oil and gas industry officials to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency. BOEMRE staff had routinely accepted meals, tickets to sporting events, and gifts from oil companies.  In 2009, the regional supervisor of the Gulf region for BOEMRE pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year's probation in federal court for lying about receiving gifts from an offshore drilling contractor. This deeply disturbing report is further evidence of the cozy relationship between BOEMRE and the oil and gas industry. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) alleges that BOEMRE has suffered from a systemic revolving door problem between the Department of Interior and the oil and gas industries. For example, thirteen months after departing as BOEMRE director, Bush appointee Randall Luthi became president of the National Oceans Industries Association (NOIA) whose mission is to secure reliable access and a favorable regulatory and economic environment for the companies that develop the nation's offshore energy resources in an environmentally responsible manner. Luthi succeeded Tom Fry, who was BOEMRE director under the Clinton administration. Luthi and Fry represented precisely the industries their agency was tasked with being a watchdog over. Lower level administrators influencing BOEMRE have also gone on to work for the oil and gas companies they once regulated. In addition, Jimmy Mayberry served as Special Assistant to the Associate Director of Revenue Management, managed by BOEMRE, from 2000 to January 2003. After he left, he created an energy consulting company that was awarded a BOEMRE contract via a rigged bid. He was convicted along with a former BOEMRE coworker Milton Dial who also came to work at the company. Both were found guilty of felony violation of conflict of interest law. (link) 

As it stands now, the underwater activities of the US Navy and the oil industry are responsible for at least 90% of the human-induced barosinusitis in cetaceans and they know it.  Thus, they must prevent any legitimate research on the topic to keep from pointing the finger at themselves.  They will fund plenty of research saying that ships kill whales, and that whale watching boats harm them, and that native cultures are killing too many whales. BUT THEY WILL NOT SPEND ONE DIME TO SHOW THAT BAROTRAUMA IS A DIVING MAMMAL'S WORSE NIGHTMARE COME TRUE!

Since they control all the money spent to study marine mammals, they naturally look with strong disfavor upon any scientists who supports pressure-related injury (barotrauma) as a cause of whale strandings. On the other hand, they look favorably on any scientists who is willing to falsify and fabricate research saying the activities of these two groups are not harming whales. The crooked scientists get the money while the honest scientists lose their jobs or cave in to the corruption

Doubt me?  Search "barotrauma and whales" in Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Google Scholar and you'll find mostly my comments and ramblings. To make matters more suspicious, the research that you will find is blatantly evasive and deceptive. For example, the first scientific objective in one US Navy sponsored research paper (link) was: "To understand how the ears of deep-diving marine mammals are structured to prevent barotrauma:" Regardless that the main purpose of this research was to understand how a whale's anatomy prevents barotrauma, Dr. Darlene Ketten, a navy favorite, declared therein, " . . .we have no knowledge of what auditory structural adaptations these animals evolved to endure bathypelagic and rapidly changing pressures . . ." There was no discussion about barotrauma in whales. Nor was there one word about the massive air sinuses and air sacs in the heads of these deep divers. How is it possible to research BAROTRAUMA in diving mammals and not mention the part of their anatomy most vulnerable to pressure-related injury? The ONLY purpose of this US Navy-sponsored scientific doublespeak was simply to have Dr. Darlene Ketten officially declare that there was "no available scientific information on barotrauma in whales."

But why would making such an official statement in a research paper be so important?  The reason involves the Marine Mammal Protection Act (link). This defective law states repeatedly that National Marine Fisheries Service must protect marine mammals to the "best available scientific information." If there is "no available scientific information on barotrauma in whales" as declared in the research paper by Dr. Darlene Ketten, the Marine Mammal Protection Act is worthless legislation to diving mammals when it comes to pressure-related injury.  In other words, as long as the scientists, who are bribed by US Navy and oil industry money, do not research barotrauma, there is no protection whatsoever from injuries that could easily blow out their sinuses, air sacs, and middle ears and cause them to die slowly over many weeks.

The "best available scientific information" clause was the object of two well-written law reviews (link) (link).

Obviously, the navy and oil industry are not going to sponsor any research that will show how their operations cause rapid pressure changes that slowly kill marine mammals. Nor do they want to see the SEAQUAKE SOLUTION accepted as the cause of mass beachings since it is only a small step from earthquake-induced barotrauma to barotrauma induced by explosives, sonar, and/or airguns.

Furthermore, any scientists who tries to research these topics own their own will face a group of well-funded crooked scientists who will strongly disagree with them. In this fashion, "best available scientific information" will never be established. Instead, scientific argument will continue until one side of the issue runs out of money. The navy and the oil industry both have unlimited funds and will pay for all the research needed to keep barosinusitis from every gaining "best available scientific information" status.

This is exactly what they are doing with the deafness issue in marine mammals; keep the scientific debate ongoing and you defeat the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and can kill unlimited numbers of whales, dolphins, seals, polar bears, and sea otters with complete immunity. In 2010, scientists working on a grant from the Navy and NOAA published a a research article saying most stranded dolphins were deafened; however, they claimed that deafness was due mostly to old age and birth defects.  The importance of this research was monumental to the navy and the oil industry since there is now a scientific debate ongoing about whether deafness in dolphins is cause by sonar, explosives, airguns, birth defects, old age, ship noises, or etcetera, etcetera. 

So now you have a scientific argument on deafness in marine mammals and the laws protecting whales are defeated. The same thing will happen with barosinusitis. Taxpayer money will be used to kill our marine mammals and there is NOTHING we can do about it.

The sad part is there are ways to prevent barosinusitis and deafness in marine mammals if only the US Navy will face the problem and stop running away from their responsibility.  I think the answer lies in researching the connection between seaquakes and beached whales. After many millions of years of living in earthquake-prone water, whales have surely developed a means whereby they can detect earthquake precursor signals and move out of the way long before they are injured.  All we need to do is duplicate the earthquake signals that scare the whales. 

 
Copyright @ 1971 thru 2012: This material is the copyrighted intellectual creation of Capt David Williams. The reproduction and use of any part or all of this intellectual creation in any form, including film, is strictly prohibited.  In particular, no part of these web pages may be distributed or copied for any commercial purpose.  No part of this intellectual property may be reproduced on or transmitted to or stored in any other website, or in any other form of electronic retrieval system or used in any film or book; however, you may link to this website without permission. Reference this web page as the source when quoting.Send email to request for any other use. (L)