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US Ties Whale Stranding to Navy Sonar    [

    400 Dead Dolphins Wash Up on African Beach
    MSNBC News

    Zanzibar - Hundreds of dead dolphins washed up along the shore of a popular tourist destination on Zanzibar's northern coast, and scientists on Friday ruled out poisoning.

    "We started noticing them last night. All are adult dolphins. We could do nothing but photograph them," said a hotel owner who preferred not to be named.

    It was not immediately clear what killed the estimated 400 dolphins, whose carcasses were strewn along a 2.5-mile stretch of Nungwi, said Narriman Jidawi, a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine Science in Zanzibar.

    But the bottleneck dolphins, which live in deep offshore waters, had empty stomachs, meaning that they could have been disoriented and were swimming for some time to reorient themselves. They did not starve to death and were not poisoned, Jidawi said.

    In the United States, experts were investigating the possibility that sonar from US submarines could have been responsible for a similar incident in Marathon, Florida, where 68 deep-water dolphins stranded themselves in March 2005.

    And US scientists on Thursday said Navy sonar may have caused a group of whales to strand themselves in Hawaii in 2004.

    A US Navy task force patrols the East Africa coast as part of counterterrorism operations. A Navy official was not immediately available for comment, but the service rarely comments on the location of submarines at sea.

    An official with the Zanzibar Fisheries Department said the islands had never before witnessed the death of so many dolphins.

    The deaths are a blow to the tourism industry in Zanzibar, where thousands of visitors go to watch and swim with wild dolphins, said Abdulsamad Melhi, owner of Sunset Bungalows, perched atop a small cliff overlooking the beach.

    Villagers, fishermen and hotel residents found the carcasses and alerted officials. Mussa Aboud Jumbe, Zanzibar's director of fisheries, went on state radio to warn the public against eating the dolphins' meat, saying the cause of death had not been determined.

    But residents who did eat the dolphins' meat early Friday were all doing fine, Jidawi said.

    The Indo-Pacific bottlenose, humpback and spinner porpoises, commonly known as dolphins, are the most common species in Zanzibar's coastal waters, with bottlenose and humpback dolphins often found in mixed-species groups.

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    US Ties Whale Stranding to Navy Sonar
    The Associated Press

    Friday 28 April 2006

Navy doesn't buy sonar theory, but will restrict use during training.

    Honolulu - The Navy's use of sonar during maritime exercises may have contributed to the mass stranding of more than 150 melon-headed whales in Hawaii's Hanalei Bay two years ago, government scientists said.

    "Our analyses indicate there was no significant weather, natural oceanographic event or known biological factors that would explain the animals' movement into the bay nor the group's continued presence in the bay," said Teri Rowles, the lead marine mammal veterinarian at the National Marine Fisheries Service.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the finding - based on a necropsy of a calf that died in the bay along with information from other studies - has led it to ask the Navy to reduce its sonar's power during exercises planned this summer in Hawaiian waters. It also asked the Navy to turn off its active sonar when the whales come within a set distance.

    The Navy says it will comply with the agency's requests, but said the report released Thursday did not conclusively show sonar triggered the stranding.

    Officials were unable to find other reasons that may have caused the melon-headed whales to swim into the bay on July 3, 2004. One whale beached itself and died a few days later, said Brandon Southall, director of NOAA's acoustics program.

    Nearby predators or other factors may have also contributed to the incident, NOAA said in the report.

    The Navy uses sonar technology to detect threats and to navigate. Some wildlife advocates believe the sound waves hurt whales, possibly by damaging their hearing or causing them to rise to the surface too quickly and get decompression sickness.

    The day before the whales entered Hanalei Bay, six US and Japanese vessels steamed north from the island of Oahu toward Kauai, intermittently using active sonar signals.

    NOAA's study concluded the whales - which usually inhabit only deep water - may have heard the signals and headed into the shallow water.

    Lt. William Marks, Navy spokesman at the Pentagon, said the six-hour gap between the last use of sonar and the whales' arrival made it unlikely sonar triggered the stranding.

    But environmentalists said the report clearly blamed sonar.

    "It adds to a long and growing list of strandings that have been associated with the Navy's use of sonar," said Michael Jasny, senior consultant with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles, citing other mass strandings in the Canary Islands, Alaska, Japan and elsewhere.