New information further tangles Hanalei whale stranding

The cause of a 2004 stranding event involving melon-headed whales at Hanalei Bay gets more interesting as time passes.

And so does the role of the moon.

(Image: Melon-headed whales circling in tight formation in Hanalei Bay July 3, 2004. Credit: NOAA.)

A new scientific paper published in February concludes that military mid-frequency played a major role, and that there's no consistent evidence that the phase of the moon did. The Hanalei stranding and a simultaneous stranding in Rota, the Mariana Islands, happened at the full moon.

But just when you start leaning hard in one direction, the foundation of your assumptions gets shaky. To muddy the water, of two Philippines strandings of melon-headed whales this year—after the new paper was published—one of those, too, happened at the full moon.

More precisely, the day after the night of the full moon, same as with Hanalei and with Rota.

Science ever requires reconsidering your conclusions based on new data.

This gets complicated. Stick with us.

In the continuing controversy over the Navy's use of sonar, and the larger role of noise in the marine environment, the prime bit of Hawai'i evidence is the apparent stranding incident in Hanalei Bay on a day in 2004 on which the Navy was using mid-frequency sonar.

A new paper compares that incident with other stranding and near stranding incidents involving the same species, the melon-headed whale. None of the other cases is known to involve sonar activity.

The paper, “Behavior of melon-headed whales, Pepnoncephala electra, near oceanic islands,” in the journal “Marine Mammal Science,” was written by Robert L. Brownell Jr of NOAA 's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Katherine Ralls of the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park, Simone Baumann-Pickering of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Michael Poole of the Marine Mammal Research Program in Moorea, French Polynesia.

They compared the Hanalei incident with a stranding that took place at precisely the same time in Sasanhaya Bay, Rota, near Guam. They also considered melon-headed whale behavior at different times at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, and at Palmyra, the Line Islands atoll where the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokule'a is scheduled to arrive today.

Researchers in a previous paper in 2006 concluded that sonar was a more than possible cause of the Hanalei stranding: “While causation of this stranding event may never be unequivocally determined, we consider the active sonar transmissions of July 2-3, 2004, a plausible, if not likely, contributing factor in what may have been a confluence of events.”

Others, notably Hawai'i researchers Joe Mobley and Paul Nachtigall, along with Navy researchers David Fromm and Stephen Martin, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, have suggested that lunar cycles or other factors could be associated with the unusual simultaneous Hanalei and Rota strandings.

In the Hanalei case, nearly 200 melon-headed whales entered the north-facing bay about 7 a.m. July 3. The animals remained in the bay, alternately swimming in small groups and milling in one group. Brownell's team called it “prestranding behavior.”

Navy sonar activity was being conducted offshore in conjunction with RIMPAC exercises. A Japanese ship nearly 30 miles away used sonar to the northwest of Kaua'i about 15 minutes before the whales entered the bay. The National Marine Fisheries Service, informed of the whale event during the day, asked the Navy to halt sonar use, which it did about 5 p.m.

The next morning, residents using canoes escorted the whales out of the bay. A newborn whale calf that washed ashore dead. “It must have been separated from its mother at some point during the event and died from dehydration,” the Brownell paper says.

Melon-headed whale strandings are far from unknown, and they have been reported occurring in the Pacific for as long as people have been watching them. In an 1841 case in Hilo, native Hawaiians in canoes are reported to have forced a stranding by driving nearshore melon-headed whales to the beach.

In the Rota case, which was going on at the same time as the Hanalei event, Brownell and his team said the whale behavior did not look like a stranding event; rather, the whales congregated without apparent panic in the bay, and later left.

But Mobley and his team argued that you couldn't ignore two near-shore appearances of large numbers of the same kind of whale, at the same time, nearly 4,000 miles apart.

“Beyond the extraordinary coincidence of these two events, at a minimum, the Rota event indicates that aggregations of this type may have natural causes totally independent of sonar activity,” wrote Mobley and his team.

In the July 2005 Nuku Hiva case, melon-headed whales congregated in a bay, and while they were there, three killer whales stranded—but the melon-headed whales did not.

“...both MHWs and killer whales behaved as if they were fleeing from some strong aversive stimulus. Perhaps this was the case but we have been unable to identify a likely candidate for such a stimulus, so the cause of the Nuku Hiva MHW event remains unknown,” Brownell and co-authors write.

The Palmyra stranding occurred in 1959, and melon-headed whales are frequently observed near shore at Palmyra.

Brownell's group said they compared the stranding dates with moon phase data, and found no correllation. But Brownell specifically excludes Rota from his lunar phase study, saying it wasn't a proper stranding.

The Navy argues that none of the events was a proper stranding, since aside from the dead calf, which washed ashore at a different Kaua'i beach near Hanalei, none of the melon-headed whales actually swam up onto the beach.

“In reality, none of the events are actually "strandings" since in none of the events did melon-headed whales actually strand,” said Mark Matsunaga, environmental public affairs officer for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Browning calls the Hanalei incident a stranding and Rota not a stranding, largely based on reports of how the whales behaved—that they cruised apparently normally at Rota and appeared anxious at Hanalei.

But the whole argument about melon-headed whales and full moons took a new turn with a February melon-headed whale stranding in the Philippines also happened the day after the full moon, the same as the Hanalei and Rota events.

On Feb. 10, the day after the full moon, local fishermen helped guide several hundred melon-headed whales back to deep water in Bataan Province of the Philippines.

A second apparent stranding in the Philippines occurred at the half moon, a week before the next full moon, about March 4.

In the latest paper, Brownell says Hanalei's incident was different from all the others. If anything, compared to their 2006 conclusion, the researchers even more securely pin the blame on the Navy.

“Our review of (melon-headed whale) behavior strengthens the case that (mid-frequency sonar) use played a major role in the near MS in Hanalei Bay,” they write.

The Navy itself doesn't deny some role for sonar in the Hanalei incident, but argues for scientific caution.

“Much remains to be learned about cetaceans, including melon-headed whales,” Matsunaga said.

“Brownell's study is certainly not the final word on melon-headed whale aggregations. Even if one accepts that all scientific studies are subjective and selective by nature, we believe Brownell has overstepped."

He notes that the Mobley team in 2006 “indicated mass strandings are more common during the full moon and third quarter.

“That is not to say that lunar influences cause strandings, but they may result in animals being closer to shore in some environments and thus, serve as a contributing factor. Marine mammals strand for a variety of reasons, some of which are still unknown,” Matsunaga said.

One issue is whether birthing has anything to do with the full moon strandings. The baby whale found dead near Hanalei was just a week old. Two of four dead whales found near one of the February Philippine strandings were females, one of which was pregnant and one of which had just given birth.

Here is a line from the Convention on Migratory Species:

“Mass strandings of melon-headed whales have been reported from Moreton Island and Crowdy Heads, Australia, Malekoula Island, Vanuatu, the Seychelles, Aoshima, Japan, Piracanga Beach, Brazil, the Kwajalein Atoll, and Tambor, Costa Rica. It has been noted that in several mass strandings of this species, the ratio of females to males was about 2:1. This may reflect behavioural segregation.”

That raises the whole issue of human interference. If melon-headed whales have a history of entering bays and nearshore waters en masse, they also have a history of getting themselves out of those bays without help.

Except for handful of dead animals found on the beach the whales in most of these incidents did not physically strand themselves--did not run themselves up on the beach a la Whalerider.

What's the appropriate human response in this situation--they appear to be in distress, or at least behaving unusually, but do not appear to be in immediate danger?

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

A photo of Phyllostegia hispida, Hawai'i's latest endangered species

For those on the email list, please note that we now have a photo of the Moloka'i mint, Phyllostegia hispida, which was the subject of yesterday's Raising Islands post. It's now in the original story, but here, too. Reader Bill Garnett of Wiliwili Hawaiian Plants, in Kalae, Moloka'i, Hawaii, took the picture and kindly provided the shot.

A Moloka'i mint, perhaps saved by the endangered species process

The listing process for endangered species, is just paperwork—it has no real effect, right?

Wrong, in the case of the very latest member of the federal endangered species list.

There, the attention has perhaps already saved the plant from extinction.

The species is a little Moloka'i mint called Phyllostegia hispida. It has never been common, and has no known common name.

(Image: The mint in flower, with unidentified butterfly. Credit: Bill Garnett. Wiliwili Hawaiian Plants, Moloka'i, Hawaii.)

It was officially added to the U.S. list of endangered species today, March 17, 2009.

But it might not have made it this far if the attention of being a candidate endangered species hadn't launched an effort to protect it.

For most of the 1900s, only 10 individuals were known, all from the forested mountains of east Moloka'i, but they all died out. Scientists figured P. hispida was a goner.

This little plant isn't the kind of mint you put in a julep, and it doesn't have a minty smell, but it's a relative of the fragrant mints. It's a vine with lots of branches—kind of sprawling and messy. It has floppy, rough-haired leaves and clusters of white flowers, according to the proposed listing notice last year in the Federal Register. The listing notice contains virtually all the information known about the plant.

In 2005, botanists searching Kamakou, a preserve operated by The Nature Conservancy, found two of them growing in the wild. And in the last two years, a total of 24 of them have been found, all but one in Kamakou Preserve, and the remaining plant in the state's Pu'u Ali'i Natural Area Reserve.

Cuttings were taken and carefully rooted, and the plantlets were re-established in Kamakou.

There are now 238 plants growing in the wild.

But there's still so little known about it that scientists aren't sure how best to protect it, other than growing it from cuttings and planting it in the wild. One assumes that protection from feral pigs and non-native weeds are important. And keeping an eye on it for disease or other problems.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has a year to designate the critical habitat for the species, but based on what's known about the plant, the places where it grows—in high Moloka'i at elevations between 2,300 and 4,200 feet—are pretty much already protected by the Conservancy and the state.

But one benefit of being identified as a plant in peril is that more folks are paying attention to it. And that may be the key to its survival.

“A variety of organizations such as the University of Hawaii’s Lyon Arboretum on O‘ahu, the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kaua‘i, and Kalaupapa National Historical Park on Moloka‘i are propagating plants that may be used for outplanting into suitable habitat.

“Land managers from Hawai’i’s Department of Land and Natural Resources have fenced some plants to protect them from feral ungulates, and The Nature Conservancy continues to control feral pigs and alien plants within the Kamakou Preserve,” said the Fish and Wildlife Service in a press release.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Green gasoline: oxymoron or the future?

Gasoline is everyone's idea of the anti-biofuel—the stuff we're trying to get away from. Is it even conceivable to think of gas as green?

Well, sure, if it doesn't come from oil or coal, and particularly if it comes from a renewable source.

(Image: University of Wisconsin student Edward Kunkes in the lab used to convert sugars into liquid fuels. Credit: Jim Dumesic, University of Wisconsin.)

What if you make it out of sugar cane? Better yet, what if you can make it out of non-edible sugars in agricultural waste and non-food plants?

Everybody knows you can efficiently make alcohol out of sugar, and create either rum or a fuel that can run an engine. Not everybody likes using ethanol fuel, and it does have its unique set of issues. Now new research has developed a way to make gasoline out of sugars.

Two independent groups using different approaches came up with the discovery.

“Sugars and carbohydrates can be processed like petroleum into the full suite of products that drive the fuel, pharmaceutical and chemical industries,” says the National Science Foundation press release on the work.

The independent teams, both working in Madison, Wisconsin, were Randy Cortright and associates at Virent Energy Systems, and James Dumesic at the University of Wisconsin. Madison isn't that big a city, and these guys obviously know each other. Cortright used to be a student of Dumesic.

The techniques have been discussed since as early as 2006. They call the system aqueous phase reforming.

“In passing a watery slurry of plant-derived sugar and carbohydrates over a series of catalysts—materials that speed up reactions without sacrificing themselves in the process—carbon-rich organic molecules split apart into component elements that recombine to form many of the chemicals that are extracted from non-renewable petroleum,” the release says.

The process yields an oil that can readily be converted into gasoline. Being able to buy gasoline made from sugars from this process is still a few years off, but the scientific teams are sure they can get there.

Said Cortright: "Our scientists now have years of expertise with our BioForming process and are rapidly moving the technology to commercial scale. We are quickly working to put our renewable, green gasoline and other hydrocarbon biofuels in fuel tanks all over the world."

But isn't gasoline a fuel source of the past?

"Even when solar and wind, in addition to clean coal and nuclear, become highly developed, and cars become electric or plug-in hybrid, we will still need high energy-density gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for planes, trains, trucks, and boats," said John Regalbuto, director of the Catalysis and Biocatalysis Program at the National Science Foundation.

One of the interesting things about gasoline, Virent says, is that it spontaneously separates from water. Ethanol, by contrast, must be distilled to separate it from water, and that's an energy-intensive process.

Green gasoline is not by any means the only big advance going on in fuel science. Here's just one other.

Researchers at Penn State have found they can produce hydrogen through electrolysis using cheap stainless steel cathodes instead of ones made of expensive platinum. They get similar yields, and although it takes a little more steel than platinum, it's so much cheaper that it saves bundles.

"Stainless steel brush cathodes can produce hydrogen at rates and efficiencies similar to those we have achieved with platinum-catalyzed carbon cloth," says Bruce E. Logan, Kappe professor of environmental engineering.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Does Ni'ihau fish kill cause still lurk?

Nearly two months after they were found, the thousands of dead fish on Ni'ihau's coast are still a mystery.

Fish have stopped dying, and health officials have told residents they can resume eating their nearshore marine life.

(Image: One of the species killed in the January 2009 Ni'ihau fish kill was the humuhumu 'ele'ele. This 1903 image from NOAA's historic fisheries collection is originally from "The Shore Fishes of the Hawaiian Islands, with a General Account of the Fish Fauna", by David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann. Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission)

But what killed the fish? Can it happen again? Is there some lurking threat? And what about the initial suspect, the use of rat poison on the neighboring islet of Lehua. Was that the culprit?

The answer to the last question, in short, is no. Something killed lots of fish near Ni'ihau, but it's extremely unlikely it was diphacinone, the rat bait that was aerially distributed on nearby Lehua Islet. More on this farther down.

Ni'ihau residents grew understandably concerned when thousands of dead fish washed ashore in January, and they made the logical connection to an aerial application of the rat poison diphacinone on nearby Lehua Islet a couple of weeks earlier.

After weeks of research, the Ni'ihau fish kill continues to baffle. But the research is continuing.

The first suspect was diphacinone, so here's the case on that. It was used nearby—Ni'ihau and Lehua are only half a mile apart—and the time of application, early January, was reasonably close to when large numbers of dead fish were seen, which was in the third week of January. But all the evidence thus far appears to show that diphacinone could not have been the culprit.

A key piece of evidence is a research project done just a year earlier on another steep-sided Hawaiian island, about the same size as Lehua, where precisely the same rat poison was distributed in the same way. The report by Robert W. Gale, Michael Tanner, and Carl E. Orazio is “Determination of Diphacinone in Sea Water, Vertebrates, Invertebrates, and Bait Pellet Formulations Following Aerial Broadcast on Mokapu Island, Molokai, Hawai’i.”

Within days after the broadcast of diphacinone at Mokapu, the researchers tested the water, they tested the fish, they tested the 'opihi clinging to the rocks on the side of the island. They also checked the water at Kalaupapa, which is downwind from Mokapu, as Niihau is (during tradewind weather) downwind from Lehua. Their result: “No detectable concentrations of diphacinone were found in the fish, limpets, or sea-water samples from Mokapu Island or from the reference sites.”

Diphacinone is a powerful anticoagulant. In big enough doses, it inhibits blood clotting, causing internal bleeding and death in target species. It is primarily used to control rodents, like rats, mice and voles, and can harm bats as well. These species are very susceptible to it in quite small doses. It is listed as slightly to moderately toxic in fish, although only freshwater fishes were tested.

We checked diphacinone at Extoxnet, a chemical toxicity site operated by a number of universities in the United States, and at NOAA's toxic chemical site, as well as a label for one of the diphacinone baits. Make no mistake, diphacinone in high enough concentrations is extremely toxic to humans. In its pure form, a teaspoon full is probably enough to kill a human.

Here are some pieces of the puzzle:

The baits are extremely dilute mixtures, with a fraction of a percent diphacinone in the bait pellets.

Diphacinone doesn't survive long in the marine environment. It decomposes quickly in water and sunlight.

The necropsies done on the Ni'ihau fish showed they had no detectable diphacinone.

There were no heavy rains during the period between the distribution of rat bait and the fish kill that would have caused rat bait to wash into the ocean.

And, for the entire period in question, winds and currents in the Lehua were flowing away from Niihau not toward it.

The dominant fish involved in the kill were two species of triggerfish, the humuhumu 'ele'ele and the humuhumu hi'ukole. Also located were a few gray chub, or nenue, and a blue-stripe snapper, ta'ape.

They were of different ages and sizes, and the deterioration suggested they had died at different times.

Some appeared to have distended swim bladders, and many had inflamed gills. Gill inflammation can come from parasites, viruses, use of toxic chemicals for fishing, bacteria and other things. It's not known from diphacinone.

Inflamed gills are a fairly common symptom in fish kills across the oceans, and their cause often remains mysterious—as in this case, where no cause could be readily identified.

State aquatic biologist Don Heacock, who collected dead fish samples on Ni'ihau, said the options are endless. It could be a natural event, a man-made event at sea, a man-made event on land that affected the marine coast.

The questions are endless, too. Why did it affect only a few species, not all of them related to each other? Why both young and old, large and small specimens? Why did it continue to kill over time rather than all at once? Why only Ni'ihau and not other islands? Why were most of the dead fish found at the uninhabited southern end of Ni'ihau? What factor links inflamed gills and distended swim bladders?

It's a classic mystery. Heacock said state and federal officials continue to work on it. They're looking desperately for the clue, the link, the thing that brings the evidence into focus.

“What is it we're not seeing here?” Heacock said.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate