Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife

4 The Regulatory Leviathan

chapter four The Regulatory Leviathan While radio tags had been successfully deployed on a variety of species of birds and terrestrial animals by the mid-1960s, the use of the technique to study marine animals lagged far behind. The technical and logistical challenges of radiotagging marine mammals, sea turtles, and fishes were daunting: the animals often lived in harsh and inaccessible environments; they were difficult to locate, capture, and handle; and the fact that water blocked radio signals made it infeasible to track any species except those that spent significant amounts of time at or near the water’s surface. One of the first researchers to explore the possibility of radio-tracking marine animals was William E. Evans, a bioacoustics expert whose work at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation on U.S. Navy–sponsored projects to map the underwater soundscape had sparked his interest in technologies that would make it possible to consistently relocate individual dolphins. In 1962, Evens attended the Office of Naval Research–sponsored conference on biotelemetry at the American Museum of Natural History, where he and Lockheed colleague W. W. Sutherland presented a proposal that they had developed to radio-tag dolphins. Though they were enthusiastic about the possibilities opened up by the technique, Evans and Sutherland thought studies of captive animals 140 Wired Wilderness were just barely feasible given the state of the technology, while field studies of free-swimming dolphins were “hardly practical. The attachment of a telemetry package would involve either capture and release of the animal or some other means such as the use of a harpoon. In either case if the observer didn’t lose the equipment and/or the animal, the manipulation involved could conceivably contaminate the data collected.” Perhaps, they suggested, a remotely controlled craft that relayed the signal from the dolphin’s tag back to a mother ship would reduce the effect of the observers on the animal once he or she had been tagged, but they had “no illusions to the fact that we are going to get data that are going to be unaffected by any techniques that we use.”1 Though Evans and Sutherland were the first to publicly propose radiotracking marine mammals, two other ONR-supported bioacousticians, William Schevill and William Watkins, were the first to report field tests of the technique. Schevill and Watkins were based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where they studied the vocalizations of North Atlantic right whales and other species of cetaceans. Like Evans and most other American biologists studying whales and dolphins at the time, the majority of whom were funded by ONR, Schevill and Watkins were primarily interested in questions of information and communication. Radio tracking, they hoped, would make it possible to monitor the relationship between vocalizations and behavior in individual cetaceans over extended periods of time. In the fall of 1964, WHOI hosted a conference on the oceanographic applications of high-flying aircraft and artificial satellites, which held out the possibility that, as conference organizer Paul Fye put it, for “the first time the whole world ocean could be placed under continuous surveillance for purely scientific purposes.” In the paper he gave at the conference on the radio tracking of whales, Schevill noted the technical challenges of devising a waterproof, hydrodynamic tag and a ship-based tracking system as well as “the sporting uncertainty of the actual tagging of the whale.” Unlike the small cetaceans that Evans and Sutherland had hoped to tag or the terrestrial and avian species with which most researchers worked, adult right whales were far too large to be captured or restrained. By the following year, Schevill and Watkins had developed a small, waterproof cylindrical radio tag with an antenna at one end and a barbed metal dart at the other, which they attached to the end of a weighted pole that could be dropped from a helicopter hovering over a whale as it surfaced. Although they managed to attach a few tags using this risky method, the tags were often damaged in the attachment processes. Even in the handful of cases in which the researchers were able to detect a signal from a The Regulatory Leviathan 141 surfacing whale, the whale inevitably submerged again before they were able to triangulate its exact location.2 Most researchers who attempted to radio-track whales, sea turtles, and other marine animals in the 1960s experienced similar frustrations. In 1965, Lowell Adams, one of...