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The oceans are getting noisier, and that’s bad news for whales, dolphins, and sea turtles who use sound to communicate and navigate, researchers declared at a United Nations wildlife conference. Rumbling ship engines, seismic surveys by oil and gas companies, and intrusive military sonars are triggering an “acoustic fog and cacophony of sounds” underwater, scaring marine animals and affecting their behavior. “There is now evidence linking loud underwater noises with some major strandings of marine mammals, especially deep diving beaked whales” [Reuters], says Mark Simmonds of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

Researchers have long worried that high-powered sonar pulses confuse whales and dolphins and may cause the animals to beach themselves. Marine mammals are turning up on the world’s beaches with tissue damage similar to that found in divers suffering from decompression sickness. The condition, known as the bends, causes gas bubbles to form in the bloodstream upon surfacing too quickly. Scientists say the use of military sonar or seismic testing may have scared the animals into diving and surfacing beyond their physical limits, Simmonds said [AP]. He points to two recent strandings as possible results of the noisy waters (although a link has not been proved): the 100 melon-headed whales that were found on a Madagascar beach, and the two dozen dolphins that got stranded in southern England.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the Navy over the Pacific Ocean’s whales, declaring that the Navy can continue its military exercises using high-powered sonar, despite environmentalists’ arguments that the sonar can harm whales’ ears or cause the panicked animals to beach themselves. The court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that national security needs override these concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stating: “Of course, military interests do not always trump other considerations, and we have not held that they do. In this case, however, the proper determination of where the public interest lies does not strike us as a close question” [ABC News].

The lawsuit centered on 14 sonar exercises that the Navy wanted to conduct off the coast of Southern California to train seamen in detecting enemy submarines. In his opinion, Roberts stressed the military threat posed by modern subs. “Modern diesel-electric submarines . . . can operate almost silently, making them extremely difficult to detect and track.” America’s potential adversaries have at least 300 of these subs, he said. “The president — the commander in chief — has determined that the training with active sonar is ‘essential to the national security’” [Los Angeles Times].

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How do you get a snot sample from a shy behemoth of the deep? That question stumped researchers studying whale health, who wanted to give the animals check-ups without corralling and traumatizing them. Now, researchers have come up with an ingenious answer, flying a remote-control helicopter through the jets ejected by the whales’ blowholes. The helicopter has petri dishes strapped to it, which collect any bacteria, fungi, and viruses that were in the whales’ lungs.

The collected samples could make a big contribution to scientists’ understanding of infectious diseases in whale populations. Researcher Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse explains: “We don’t know much about them because they are so big and they are in the water all the time, and that makes it really difficult to obtain biological samples that are relevant to determining health in these populations; unless they’ve already stranded or unless they are in captivity, which are hardly representative of a normal population” [BBC News].

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The Supreme Court heard arguments today on whether environmental laws can be used to prevent the U.S. Navy from conducting sonar exercises off the coast of California, where some researchers believe the sonar could harm whales and other marine mammals. Last March, a federal judge strictly limited the sonar practice, but the Navy appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

The lower court’s order disrupts the Navy’s war-game exercises, which are “critical to the nation’s security,” said U.S. Solicitor Gen. Gregory Garre. He also disputed claims that the piercing sound of the sonar causes severe harm to the whales. But Los Angeles lawyer Richard B. Kendall described the sonar as like the sound of “a jet engine in this room multiplied by 2,000 times.” He said beaked whales, in panic, dive deeply to escape the sound, and they sometimes suffer bleeding and even death when they try to resurface [Los Angeles Times].

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A new fossil study has pinpointed the moment when whales lost their distinct legs and tail and developed flukes, sometimes called tail fins, instead: Flukes are the two wide, flat triangular lobes on a whale’s back end and are made of skin and connective tissue, with bones in the middle [National Geographic News]. Researchers say that the Georgiacetus vogtlensis, whose fossil was found in Alabama, was one of the last whales to have powerful back legs and a tail like a dog’s, and that whales evolved flukes between 40 and 38 million years ago.

Paleontologists already knew that the ancestors of whales once strode on land on four legs, just as other mammals do. Over time, as they evolved to dwell in water, their front legs became flippers while they lost their back legs and hips, although modern whales all still retain traces of pelvises, and occasionally throwbacks are born with vestiges of hind limbs [LiveScience].

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The International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting is almost always a quarrelsome affair, with Japan pressing for less stringent rules on whale hunting and environmental groups shouting about the need for stronger protections for the marine mammals. But this year’s meeting, which began on Monday, became strangely peaceful yesterday, as opposing sides celebrated a rare agreement–an agreement not to talk about the hard stuff until next year’s conference.

The most controversial topics before the commission are Japan’s demand to lift the ban on commercial whaling in its coastal waters, and a proposal by South American nations to create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic where hunting would always be prohibited. The international commission agreed to table both of these questions, and decided that over the next year a 24-nation working group … will meet in private to thrash out the most contentious issues that have left the whaling body so deeply divided [Australian Associated Press (AAP)].

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The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take on the above question in its next term, when it will wrestle with a complicated lawsuit between the Navy and the Natural Resources Defense Council. For years, the environmental group has been fighting to limit the Navy’s use of sonar in training exercises off the California coast, arguing that the sonar injures and disorients whales and other marine mammals.

Environmentalists successfully sued the Pentagon over the practice in March, forcing major changes in the Navy’s annual offshore training exercises. A federal judge ruled it was “constitutionally suspect” for President Bush to issue a national security exemption so no environmental impact assessment was carried out [CNN]. The Supreme Court won’t try to determine whether the sonar is causing confused whales to beach themselves, but will instead weigh in on whether the executive branch had the right to preempt an environmental law by granting the exemption to the Navy.

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